Threesome
by locogirlp
Summary: Three men - DI Alec Hardy, DI Peter Carlisle, and Detective Emmett Carver - are destined to meet. But how? What could possibly bring these three men together? Try Hardy's daughter, on Carlisle's beat...in Carver's town. Anything is possible. Nothing is sure. Will the three work together, or will they tear each other apart?
1. Chapter 1

_Chapter One – January 2014_

"Bollocks!" bellowed a rough, angry Scottish voice from the Detective Chief Inspector's office. Muffled as it was by the closed door, it still inspired a momentary pause of surprise in the flow of the early morning's routine.

DI Peter Carlisle sank into his chair and glanced curiously across the office at the closed doors, then around at the northern English town of Kendal's constabulary as the hustle and bustle of the everyday gradually returned to normal. He sucked his tongue into the roof of his mouth. The place stank of burned coffee and stale cigarettes but he barely registered it, so acquainted was he with its precise perfume. He sighed and rubbed his eyes, staring at the thick file on his desk for a moment with a despairing determination before he heard DI Bryan Blythe's familiar footfalls.

"Why, hello and good morning, DI Blythe," Peter drawled, throwing his feet up onto the desk with a smirk and a cocked eyebrow deliberately designed to provoke a reaction from his easily irritated partner. Blythe scowled at him obediently and Peter chuckled to himself as he absently plucked at the coffee cup before him on the desk. He grimaced as it sloshed day-old liquid over the rim and onto his fingers. Shrugging, he licked each one dry.

Blythe opened his mouth to say something but was interrupted by a passing DC. "Any idea what that was all about?" the DC said, looking at Blythe but speaking to Carlisle. He yanked a thumb towards the DCI's office.

"Not at all," Carlisle responded with a nonchalant shrug and wiped his fingers on his coat. The copper nodded and walked back to his desk while Blythe's eyebrows shot up in silent inquiry.

Carlisle shrugged again. "Someone's in the DCI's," he said with a dismissive jerk of his head towards the doors across the station. His eyes trailed back down to the heavy sheaf of files on his desk. "It seems we've got work to do, don't we, Blythe?"

"That we do. What have we got?" Blythe grabbed a rolling chair from a neighboring desk and pulled it toward Carlisle's, pushing a hand through his short blond hair. He swung his leg over the seat and perched in it, back facing forward. His close-set hazel eyes lit up, resembling the overeager terrier Carlisle often mentally likened him to.

Carlisle couldn't stop himself from rolling his eyes. "You never fail to inspire me with your willingness to slog through the enticing buffet of burglaries and speed sellers," he snarked acerbically in his solid Scottish brogue, sweeping a hand to indicate the files strewn across his desk. As he did he spied a passing DC carrying a cardboard box of doughnuts and perked up straight away. Dropping his feet back down on the floor, he stretched out a long-fingered hand and snatched one from the box. At the colleague's quiet "hey!" of protestation he tried - and failed - to look suitably abashed before he stuffed the glazed treat into his mouth.

Blythe's beady eyes flashed at the droll dismissal in Carlisle's tone. "Just because _you_ don't take anything seriously since you lost…." he began with the air of a man itching to build up a head of steam, but Carlisle had heard plenty.

"Blythe," he snapped in warning, his cocoa eyes hardening to amber, "that's enough."

Blythe regarded Carlisle for a moment, unable to keep the simmering disdain he felt for the DI from showing in his eyes. "Whatever you say…..partner." The younger man lingered on the last word, rolling it around in his mouth and painting it with a note just barely this side of contempt.

Carlisle stared back at Blythe in silence, his tongue working the space behind his front teeth. He'd be damned if he'd let the younger DI think he'd schooled him. Never mind that Blythe was right, Carlisle thought to himself, and then pushed the thought away. He'd never admit to regretting a decision – no, let's call it as it was, a _deal_ - that he'd made in lustful haste and which had ended up biting him in the arse in _so_ many ways.

The two men held each others gaze for long moments until Carlisle dropped his first, curtly switched gears, and reached for the top file from the pile stacked up on his desk. He snatched it up and slid it across his desktop with a smirk. "So. Here's a little something to keep you occupied."

* * *

><p>In the wake of his curse, former Detective Inspector Alec Hardy sat down heavily in the chair across Detective Chief Inspector Arthur Stanley's desk and curled his fingers around the lion's head armrests. The chair – ornately carved in some heavy, dark wood Alec didn't recognize - seemed clumsy and out of place in the otherwise spartan office.<p>

"I'm sorry, Alec. Truly sorry," Stanley was saying, but Hardy didn't hear him. _Invalided out_ was still thumping through his head.

"But I'm well now!" Hardy protested, pointing to his chest. A long scar across his breastbone was the only indicator of the pacemaker surgery he'd underwent the previous fall after solving the widely publicized Daniel Latimer case in the tiny West Dorset town of Broadchurch. The surgery had regulated his atrial fibrillation and saved his life. The fringe from his thick crop of auburn hair slipped into his eyes and he ran a finger along it, pushing it back into place in a gesture borne of long-entrenched habit.

"It doesn't look like they want to take a chance on having you…" the DCI paused, gesturing in the air and glancing away from Hardy's accusatory gaze before finishing his sentence, "…having you, you know….relapse or something."

"That's horseshit," Hardy hissed before he could stop himself, so he added a grudging "…Sir." The office suddenly seemed claustrophobic and sweat broke out on his upper lip. A tide of impotent frustration swept through him, clawing at his guts, and he concentrated on breathing in and out evenly. It was something he'd learned to do as a preventative measure when his heart had been given to racing out of control. The habit had stuck with him even after the surgery had stablized his irregular heartbeat and given him a second chance at life.

He closed his eyes a moment and leaned back in the ridiculous chair while he struggled to modulate his tone to a more reasonable level. Jesus bloody Christ, he swore to himself, it was hot in here. "Sir," he tried again, "I know I've been invalided out, but they made that decision before I received treatment. I've had surgery and I've been medically cleared for duty."

"Alec," Stanley said gently, looking across at the painfully thin, slightly disheveled man wearing an ill-fitting suit. "How long has it been since your surgery?"

Hardy let out a breath. "Six months. Give or take."

"Well, then." Stanley shifted in his seat and sent Alec a look, one Hardy recognized immediately. The mix of tolerance and pity was one he'd seen on many faces since his surgery and seeing it again on Stanley's rasped up raw and painful against Hardy's every nerve. He steeled himself for what would come next.

"You're still recovering," Stanley continued. "Perhaps it's too early to be getting back into the game quite yet?"

"I solved the Broadchurch case. Surely that counts for something."

"That was before you were invalided out."

Hardy ground his teeth. He knew he shouldn't say it, but it came out anyway, and in a rasping, accusatory manner. "What's the real reason for this, Sir? Is it still bloody Sandbrook?"

"Really, Alec?" Stanley tented his fingers and leaned forward, his elbows on the desk, the look of tolerance and pity replaced with a fixed glare. "It has much less to do with Sandbrook than it does with the simple reality that you are in no way ready to return to duty. _If_ you get another chance with any constabulary – and I mean _if_ - it won't be for at least another six months." He stood and opened the door, a slight movement of his head indicating the entryway. "Go home, Alec."

Stanley waited until Hardy's stubbornly infuriated gaze finally fell away into one of surrender. Alec stood and picked up his coat, shrugging it on with as much dignity as he could muster. He squared his shoulders and walked out of the station without looking back.

* * *

><p>Detective Emmett Carver opened one eye and immediately shut it again, rolling over to turn his back against the early morning northern California sun streaming in through the blinds. Still half-asleep and already grouchy – a morning person he was <em>not<em> - he groped at his waist and tugged the tangled sheet out from underneath his hip, using it to cover his face and block out more of the maddening light. He closed his eyes on a sigh and sunk back into a semi-drowse.

_Bzzzzt. _

Emmett shifted and sighed in his sleep.

_Bzzzzzzzt. _

He stirred, stretched_. What the….._

_Bzzzzzzzzzztt._

"Damn it," Emmett growled, rolling back over and giving up on his quest for slumber. His eyes still partially closed against the sun, Carver felt around on the nightstand and fumbled blindly for his phone. Just as he wrapped his fingers around it, it buzzed again. Carver swore as it slipped out of his grasp and tumbled to the floor.

_Buuzzzzzzzzzztttt._

He scooped it up and hit the answer key with a sharp punch. "What?" he barked into the phone in a voice still gritty with sleep, rolling off the bed as he spoke.

As he came to his feet the movement sent a familar sharp pain coiling down Carver's spine and he swallowed back an unintended grunt of agony. Wincing, he clutched at the band of tight muscles along his lower spine and kneaded them as he clasped the phone to his ear and paced the room. As he listened, though, he came to an abrupt halt and his hand dropped from his back. The look of exasperation on his face shifted into dread. When he spoke again it was slower, subdued. "Fine. All right. I'll be….yes. Give me fifteen."

He punched the disconnect and looked down unseeingly at the phone in his hand. "Sonofabitch," he groaned, dropping his chin onto his chest. His eyes closed. "Sonofabitch."


	2. Chapter 2

_Chapter Two – DI Peter Carlisle_

Peter locked his desk – something he never would've done in his younger years on the force – and sauntered out of the constabulary into Kendal's bracing night air. He owned a car but he rarely used it, preferring instead to stretch his long legs and walk after his usual shift of sitting on his arse all day. He paused just long enough to wrap a scarf around his neck against the winds swirling around the narrow streets from the river Kent and began his walk towards his home on Horncop Lane.

Horncop. He chuckled wryly to himself. He didn't miss the irony there. Come to think of it, neither had Blythe. It had only taken the blonde copper a few seconds after he recovered from his bout of laughter to comment on Peter's choice of address. Peter was quick to tell him that it hadn't been _his_ choice, thank you very much, that his parents had originally purchased the two-bedroom flint cottage and he'd inherited it upon their deaths in a car crash coming back from holiday in Glasgow. Blythe had enough decency to stop laughing and murmur something about how sorry he was. Carlisle didn't have the heart to tell him that he'd fibbed a bit. Only his father had actually passed in the accident. His mum was living in a retirement community for Alzheimer's patients in Kilmarnock, close to his elder sister. So far he'd successfully avoided any mention of his mum but eventually, he mused as she scratched at his stubble, he'd slip up. Eh, he'd deal with it then.

As he walked he dug into the pockets of his coat like a squirrel rooting for a nut, until he fished out a stale piece of gum in a sticky wrapper. He peeled the foil off bit by bit and pushed the thin strip into his mouth. The crystallized sugars burst apart, flooding his mouth with fruity flavors as he chewed.

_Natalie_.

Her name echoed in his head. He thrust the wad of gum against his back teeth with the flat of his tongue and walked on, hunching his shoulders against the chill.

Blythe's earlier comment still grated on him. Blythe's solid and unshakeable sense of right and wrong had endeared him to many, but to Carlisle, who bore the brunt of it? It smacked of sanctimoniousness. Nearly a decade gone by now and Bryan Blythe still couldn't seem to move past the outcome of their first murder case or stop rubbing Carlisle's nose in the shitty aftermath of it. He _relished_ doing it, Carlisle knew. It had become a comfortable fixation. It was a field upon which Blythe held the moral high ground - a place he richly savored being, where Carlisle was concerned. Peter had learned over the years that the terrier-like comparisons he'd thrown Blythe's way in their early days together were far more accurate than he ever could've guessed at the time. Blythe chased after things, worried at them, and _never_ let them go. It made him a great police officer and a miserable git of a partner.

Many times Peter had considered putting in for a transfer or at least a request for a change of partner. He _should_, he knew. He also knew why he hadn't. Even as the thought occurred to him he caught himself skittering away from contemplating it further. Concepts like karma or punishment or atonement weren't words Peter liked or even wanted to believe in. But there it was.

Peter turned the corner onto Burneside Road and nodded to a young couple walking hand in hand down the street toward him. They gave him a smile and a short nod as he skirted around them and returned to leaning into each other, intimately, shoulder to shoulder. He couldn't help remembering the times that he and Natalie had clung onto each others hands and stared that way into each others eyes, like they were the only people on God's whole Earth.

He walked on.

_Natalie._ It always came back to her. She was where all his problems had started, after all.

Meeting her had been just routine, a part of the first real murder investigation of his career. Before then he'd just worked narcotics and thefts in Kendal Rural West, but Blackpool's North Lakes constabulary had been understaffed and he and Blythe – who'd just been taken on as a new DC trainee - had been sent down to Blackpool to help out. They hadn't been there long when the body of Mike Hooley, a local tough, had been found in the locked Leisure Center that Natalie's husband Ripley Holden had just opened.

Leisure Center? Carlisle snorted, and a puff of crisp air curled out from his nostrils and steamed in the winter air. Come on. It wasn't a Leisure Center. It was an Arcade. Ripley Holden was a caricature of every bad Las Vegas stereotype you could think of - hair piled high, mutton-chop sideburns, white polyester suits. Everything about him was fake from the tip of his pomaded 'do to the tops of his white vinyl spats. He looked like he'd stolen into Elvis' disco-era closet and absconded with the lot of it.

Carlisle disliked Ripley from the moment he clapped eyes on him and shuddered to think what the woman who married a man as ridiculously crass and sleazy as this one was like. Dim, perhaps, or grasping and voracious? But, as Carlisle fancied himself enough of a looker to turn a few heads and had always been gifted with a ready charm, he figured it wouldn't be difficult to reel her in and use her to find out if Holden had any skeletons that needed unearthing. He'd had a bit of a surprise when he'd seen a picture of her in the local paper and she hadn't been glammed up or washed out, but looks could often be deceiving. He'd went about manufacturing a meeting with her where she did volunteer work at the Samaritans.

But after they met, _nothing_ had been routine again.

Whatever he'd expected, he'd been wrong. When he buzzed the buzzer at the Samaritans office and she came outside to greet him it was obvious no pictures did her justice. In the flesh Natalie Holden was disarmingly beautiful, tall and elegant with a wide toothy smile and a husky laugh that descended into the dropped chin and cutaway glance of the naturally insecure. She only had to approach him and speak to him in her whiskey voice, the wind off the promenade stirring her hair into short flips, and he was wrapping his coat around his hips to hide the immediate tightening of his trousers.

But there had been so much more to it than just instantaneous lust, he told himself with as much conviction as he could muster as he turned left onto Rydal Mount and pushed his gum through his bottom teeth. From the very beginning he'd been drawn to her like a moth to a flame. He thought himself pretty skilled at reading people's body language – it was part of being a good detective - but what he read in Natalie's made him instantly question all of his preconceived notions. The first time he'd looked into her eyes after they sat face to face in the Samaritans counseling office he saw a well of sadness in their depths so profound that it stunned him. She was drowning and she didn't even know it.

Or did she? If she did, she was a master at self-deception. She was vibrant and sexy to her very marrow but her sparkle had been snuffed out by life and a multitude of lies. He pushed at her well-constructed armor and she trotted out all the old excuses and platitudes, using them like rusting weaponry in a panicked attempt to keep the invaders at bay. But her silent screams for rescue awakened something primal within him that identified with and responded to her immense isolation. That's when it had happened, he said to himself. He hadn't meant to fall for her so quickly or so hard but she'd just knocked him completely off his tether. He'd been lost from that moment forward.

He sucked in a frosty breath and jammed his chilled hands further into his pockets. Damn it, Blythe, he cursed silently. You had to go and bring her up, did you? He wished to hell he could stop his train of thought in its tracks and get off the ride now, but in for a penny, in for a pound. It wasn't like he didn't think of her, anyway. He sighed and walked on.

So….the lies. Back to the lies. There had _always_ been the lies.

Of course he didn't tell her he was the DI investigating her husband. He'd have lost her before he'd had the chance to have her and he wanted her far more than he wanted her to have any informed choice in the matter. Besides, he'd been scared and his ego was at stake. He just hadn't trusted her to choose him. He hadn't wanted to know that she could've chosen Ripley - that garish, crass, egotistical prat - over him. So he'd been a selfish bastard, for sure, but he'd had good reason. He knew that even now he probably wouldn't choose differently if he had to do it all over again. He had never been a good loser.

After a few false starts they began a heated affair, meeting in secret as often as they could. It was only a matter of time before she found him out – after all, he _was_ the detective in charge of her husband's murder inquiry. He knew he was playing a fool's game and that she'd have to find out eventually, but he was all right with it being as later as he could make it. Of course he was, he murmured in his head. He was grabbing whatever he could take of the happiness that he'd never been able to find with anyone but her. She helped him forget the cynic at the heart of him.

But nothing ever stays hidden. He was a detective. He should know that better than anyone. And when she learned who he was, she was certain he'd played her. And she left him.

He'd deserved it, he knew, and he understood why she had. But what they had between them was too powerful to deny and it hadn't taken long before she was back in his arms and the two of them made plans to run away together. But when Natalie nearly told her husband, the fantasy she had allowed herself to indulge in finally began to fray. At her heart she was a deeply honorable woman. When she took a hard look at herself and had to confront her subterfuge and selfish desires, she couldn't justify it to herself. She told Peter she was staying.

Whatever shreds of decency he'd had left until that point disappeared within a choking haze of jealousy and despair. He'd always had a cool head during an investigation but her abandonment left him seething with hurt and lashing out at her and whomever else got in his way. The only thing that kept him putting one foot in front of the other was to fully commit to the vendetta he'd begun against Ripley Holden. Putting Ripley Holden away, using whatever means at his disposal – whether or not they were entirely ethical or even factual – was the only way he could fill the gaping hole she'd left inside of him.

Peter swung a curving right onto Caroline Street and crossed onto a quaint stone footpath. Blythe had accused him of following his dick and it was true enough, he had been. He still didn't like to think much about that time in his life. He was ashamed of what he'd been capable of then. He liked to think he'd never again descend quite so far so fast, but he was also inordinately glad he'd never been tested a second time. He didn't really want to find out for sure.

Then…there had been the deal.

He and Blythe - well, _he_, really, let's be honest here - had threatened a prostitute into fitting up Ripley for Mike Hooley's death. They'd went to arrest Ripley at his daughter Shyanne's wedding but Carlisle ended up with something more than a collar for a murder. Ripley had blatantly exposed Peter and Natalie's affair in front of Blythe, adding a notch onto his relationship pole with the young DC that Carlisle knew wouldn't ever really go away. But that was nothing compared to the one that Carlisle himself had added later on that day.

Carlisle and Ripley had went out for a beer on the dock. Over that beer, Ripley proved he wasn't half as stupid as Carlisle had thought he was. Ripley offered to give him Natalie, if Carlisle would agree to give him and his son their freedom.

The funny thing was, Carlisle could see that the man was being sincere in his own flashy, self-aggrandizing way. He really loved his wife, and he'd seen her happy, and he'd understood that it wasn't him that she was happy with. He was a lot of things, was Ripley Holden, but he wasn't a man given to gambling when the decks were stacked against him for real and he knew he held the losing hand. So he'd sold Natalie to Carlisle for his freedom.

He had to give it to Ripley. Carlisle didn't think he could have been as magnanimous if he had been in Ripley's shoes.

But Carlisle had been a willing buyer. And what had been his currency? he muttered to himself and shook his head ever so slightly against the thought. He remembered leaning against that banister and selling his soul for Natalie. He thought he was getting the bargain of a lifetime.

It was a measure of how far gone he'd been that his conscience had barely spasmed in response to his threat to stitch Blythe up with drugs in his locker unless he stopped pursuing the Hooley case. Peter had soothed any remaining spasms by giving Blythe that crooked accountant, Adrian Marr. Ripley had given him Marr on a platter.

Peter's mouth twisted. It was the laziest and most self-serving bit of police work he'd ever done. It was because he knew that to be the truth, that he couldn't stand even now to look Blythe in the eye or hear the younger copper remind him of it. It was bad enough that he knew what he'd sacrificed. Honor. Trust. Partnership. He didn't have to be poked at like a bear in a cage.

Fitting Blythe up for drugs was a threat made by a desperate man, one he wasn't sure would even work. Surely Blythe had known as well as he had that the threat had been an empty one? Carlisle was just lucky that Blythe had never sold him out to their DCI on any of his behavior – Natalie, Ripley, or the drugs. He hadn't been entirely sure at the time why he hadn't but as the years went by Carlisle was growing uncomfortably certain he'd arrived at the answer. It was a form of leverage. He knew he owed the younger copper, and he'd stood up for Blythe when he was up for his promotion from DC to DI, but Blythe just hadn't seemed to be able to let bygones be bygones. The snide remarks just kept coming.

Carlisle rounded Caroline Lane and onto Horncop, taking a right. It was a little warmer here. The roads were narrow and the houses were tucked up behind waist-high slate walls along the pavement. He wasn't too far from home now and he didn't want to think about all this any longer when he arrived. Although his nose and ears were decidedly chilly, he slowed his pace down a bit and dipped his nose down into his scarf.

Of course he'd eventually told Natalie what he and Ripley had agreed to. Yet another in a long line of mistakes. She'd taken it rather badly, something he couldn't fathom given their subsequent happiness. She'd been able to leave Ripley without the guilt she would've had to carry on her own, and Ripley wanted to see her happy so he'd released her from the guilt she felt at betraying him. She accused him – and Ripley – of interfering in her life and bartering her betwixt them like a business deal.

He smirked into the scarf. He supposed she might have had a point.

He and Natalie had left Blackpool as soon as they could after her divorce was final. They'd both wanted to leave old memories and difficult beginnings behind and since Peter had a house and a job in Kendal it seemed like the perfect temporary stop on their way to wherever it was they were going. They moved into his house here on Horncop Lane and made a right go of it. Peter had went back to working in the station. He wasn't one to sit around and do nothing and being a copper was the only thing he'd wanted to do since he was a boy. Natalie made plans to find a job.

They'd married, but then Natalie fell pregnant. It was a complete and utter shock to the both of them. Natalie had assumed that she was beyond that phase in her life, and as for himself? He was guilty of wearing blinders about a lot of things. Being a father was just one of many.

When Natalie lost the baby in her second month, she began to be restless and depressed. It didn't help that she could sense his relief that "it wasn't meant to be." Kids just hadn't ever been in his plans, even with her.

Peter paused at the front gate of his house and chewed on his bottom lip while he unlatched the gate, then trudged up the steps and onto the landing. He shivered in the near-dark while he dug in his pocket for his house key. A sudden sense of loss gnawed at him and he stopped with his key in the door to breathe through it, closing his eyes. He was surprised, he supposed, that he still had it in him to feel it. He'd thought it was all gone by now.

He turned the key in the lock and went into the warm dark house, toeing off his shoes. He thought about turning the light on but he knew the place so well that he didn't really have to. He found his reclining chair with ease and sank down into it without removing his coat. It was back to Blythe again, he supposed. Blythe was the only part of this that he still had to face every morning.

At first he'd been able to work alongside Blythe with a combination of bravado and unapologetic defiance, but after a while the facade just became too much to bear and he'd ended up bringing the nagging guilt of it back home to Natalie. He had been harsh and cruel and impatient, and it was the worst time he could've chosen to do so.

Peter had never told Natalie what he did to Blythe in order to arrange for Ripley's freedom. Blythe's distinct disregard and dislike for her mystified her and eventually hurt her feelings deeply. She and Blythe weren't the least bit civil to each other. Natalie was a walking reminder to Blythe that he had lost one of the biggest opportunities of his career, he had let a likely murderer go free, and he had been betrayed by a partner that was supposed to have his back.

Natalie was a walking reminder to him, as well. Blythe hadn't been the only one to suffer the slings and arrows of conscience. It had just taken him longer. It hadn't been easy to admit, even to himself, that he'd made a mistake with Natalie. Many mistakes, if he was honest. He wasn't the type to over-analyze decisions but even he had to cop to the fact that he'd reacted in lust and in haste.

They'd divorced. Nowadays she lived on her own back in Blackpool.

Natalie had told him once that with him, she had been the Natalie she wanted to be and not the Natalie that she really was. He had just never understood that she had been telling him the truth.


	3. Chapter 3

_Chapter Three – Detective Emmett Carver_

Saturday, 16 Jan, 8:14 am

Emmett Carver pulled alongside a squad car marked "Gracepoint PD" and a khaki-colored Land Rover in his dark blue sedan and shifted the car into park. He killed the motor and climbed out of the car, tugging his coat on and shutting the door behind him. He glanced down to his right and his gaze trailed the lengthy, lazy curved edges of Gracepoint's North Beach. Even though the early morning wind slicing off the shoreline was biting, Emmett felt the need to tug at the oppressive tie at his throat until it loosened enough for him to suck in a breath. He was still quite a distance away from the scene but he could see the yellow crime tape fluttering in the breeze.

A trail carved out of the surrounding bluffs wound its way down to the stony beachfront and Carver began the slow descent from the cars parked at the top of the cliff face. Once or twice his rubber-soled shoes slipped on the spray-coated rocks and he stumbled, wincing at the pain that shot down his spine as he righted himself with an effort and half-slid his way down to the bottom.

North Beach was nestled in a crescent bay scored by centuries of erosion out of the native sandstone. The cliffs that flanked it were ten to fifty feet high in places above the shoreline. The jagged, narrow beach was lined with rocky outcrops and hidden coves and peppered with rocks broken from the cliffside. Erosion-carved keyhole openings in the cliffs above filtered the morning sun into prisms that skimmed the surface of the water. The surf gleamed in the gloomy early light like a foaming silver platter against the backdrop of the russet cliffs.

Carver paused a moment to let his breathing even out and planted his hands on his waist. He craned his neck and scanned the edge of the cliffs. There were no access roads fit for vehicles on this side of the beach and that meant he'd have to walk the rest of the way to the scene. He was gratified, though, to see no press vans anywhere in sight. Yet. They'd be on this place like stink on shit as soon as they smelled a story, so he'd best get a move on, he muttered darkly to himself.

Emmett swung back towards the beach and pinched the bridge of his nose with a sigh. Here it comes again, he thought as he picked up his pace down the craggy shoreline to join the officers he could see sequestered behind the tape line. _It_ was the elation mixed with dread and a vicious desire for justice that accompanied him at the beginning of a case. The feeling always discomfited him no matter how many times he'd experienced it. He resisted the guilty urge to tamp it down, knowing he'd be much better off using it instead of fighting it.

Now that Carver was closer he shook off his introspection. He approached the tape with his customary precision, scrutinizing the beach over and around the tape line. A few officers were moving slowly around the perimeter and he caught the repeated flash of a camera lens out of the corner of his eye. He was fifty feet away when he spotted his partner Devyn Garrett, a tall auburn-haired officer some ten years his junior dressed in dark slacks, sturdy boots, and a hooded two-toned anorak. She saw him approaching and spoke a few words to the other officers near her before ducking under the tape to meet him halfway.

"Morning," she murmured and paused in front of him, blocking his view of the scene. He grunted in response and went to step around her but she seized his arm and brought him to a stop.

He stifled his irritation with an effort and looked pointedly down at her hand on his arm. It took her a moment to drop her grip. "What've we got?" he asked her without preamble as he reached in his pocket for his glasses.

As he slid them on and pushed them back over his forehead she blinked at him and pulled at her anorak, wrapping it tighter around her angular body. Carver frowned and shifted his weight, cocking his head while struggling to rein in his rising impatience. He swore inwardly when he noted her normally pale skin was nearly ashen. Now was not the time for her to go soft on him.

"Garrett? Get a grip," he snapped, hoping he'd piss her off enough to focus. "Talk to me."

To his satisfaction, she bristled. Her nostrils flared and some color returned to her pallid face. "White female. Maybe fifteen or sixteen? We don't have a clue who she is yet. There's no identification on her body. There's…."

Carver was listening but he was already moving past her as he did. On his way he caught the barest glimpse of toenail polish, glinting scarlet on ghostly skin against the darkened sand on the rocky beach. A few of the officers surrounding the body stepped back upon his approach and whatever else Garrett had been saying faded away into background noise. He pulled up short as a wave of dizzy nausea swept over him and narrowed his field of vision_._ _Jesus, Mary and Joseph_. 

He wasn't aware he'd said the oath out loud until Garrett came up behind him and breathed, "I know."

In a shadowy hole in the sand about twenty feet off the shoreline, a young girl's partially-buried nude body was laid out on the beach. She looked about fifteen or sixteen, just a few years younger than his own daughter, Julianne. Julianne. Emmett heaved in a breath. A flash of another place, another time. A morgue. His wife Kirsten, pale and cold, like this girl here. Sand and blood and beaches. A year ago now, and he still…he grit his teeth, fighting back the bitter acid rising in his throat. He and Julianne had come back to this godforsaken place. It wouldn't do to think about Julianne just now, or Kirsten for the love of God, or he'd never get through the next five minutes.

He pushed the thoughts aside and forced himself to take a few more steps forward while he tried to shield his eyes from the morning sun glinting over the ridges above him. He studied the scene. The girl's arms were stretched out over her head and placed at forty-five degree angles from her torso, and her scarlet-painted toes pointed towards the shoreline. Both her hands were closed into fists and she was clutching something in each of them. Her long dark hair was matted to her scalp and sand still clung to her alabaster skin. She looked for all the world like a young girl frozen in the middle of making a snow angel in the sand.

Judging by the size and depth of the hole and the precise angles of her limbs, Carver guessed her killer had deliberately posed her and then buried her. This area of the beach was subject to wildly swinging tides, something he knew anyone native to the area would be familiar with. Nothing buried here stayed buried for long. It made Carver question whether her killer had meant for her to be discovered.

What unnerved him the most wasn't the way she'd been posed, though admittedly that was disturbing enough. No, the worst part of it was that she was smiling. Her face was upturned, and she was smiling. A shudder went through Emmett at the sight.

He knew he had to get closer, so he steeled himself and took a few more steps towards the girl's body. His steps brought him fully out of the morning sun and into the shadows cast by the high cliffside. It took a moment for his eyes to fully adjust but when they did, he couldn't help the "Fucking hell!" that burst from his lips, or the step backward he took.

He'd thought that she was smiling. She wasn't. What he'd taken at first for a grin was an empty, yawning caricature of one. Her killer had sliced her cheeks in a Glasgow smile and tilted her head up towards the sky. The curved wounds were deep and extended all the way back to her ears. Her gums were exposed and white where they weren't caked with a mixture of blackened sand and crusted blood, making her mouth gape in a grin twice the size of a normal smile. Her teeth were gone. All of them. Pulled out one by one? He couldn't tell. He couldn't see her tongue either, and he wasn't sure he wanted to.

She was gazing up into the California sky - or she would've been, if she'd had eyes. Hers were gouged out. Emmett wondered faintly what color they'd been.

However horrible they were, though, none of these wounds alone had caused her death. Those had all been for symbolism – or sport - and around the sheer wave of fury rising in him Emmett prayed that the girl had been dead before they'd been perpetrated. The fatal wound was a ear to ear slit in her throat that was so deep Carver was sure if she wasn't lying half-buried in the sand, her head would roll half off her body.

Emmett noticed he was sweating. He tugged again at his tie. He needed air. He needed to go sit down. He needed a stiff drink. He needed a lot of things. He closed his eyes and breathed, knowing what he really needed to do was keep it together and be professional. He could feel Garrett hovering behind him and he didn't think he could bear it if she tried something motherly like placing her hand on his shoulder. Shut it off, Carver, he admonished himself. Do your job. Do it, because no one did it for Kirsten.

"Hayes," he barked at the nearest officer, a dirty blonde, blue-eyed rookie looking a little green around the gills. "Go find whoever found her and keep them away from the press. Take them into the station and get their statements."

Hayes nodded and scurried off. Carver swung around to address Ian Cecil, a tall, thin CSI busy taking notes on a pad of paper. "Cecil," he said and motioned down at the girl's body, "you done here?" He surprised even himself with the steadiness in his voice.

"About, sir." The young man tucked the pad of paper into his coat pocket. "We've yet to bag and tag, but photos, drawings and casts of the area are done. We've lost a lot of the possible footprints because of the surf."

"The surf." Carver grimaced. "When was the last high tide?"

Cecil pulled his phone out of his pocket and hit a few buttons. "About midnight, sir," he finally said.

Emmett swore under his breath. Was this more indication that the killer was local, then? Someone who'd planted the girl here knowing the tide would wash away so much of the evidence even as it revealed her body? He glanced out at the water and saw thin streams of swirling foam lapping against the freestanding monolithic stones out in the bay just beyond the breakers. "If that means what I think it means…." he trailed off, shaking his head. "And when's the next?"

Cecil checked his phone again, then his watch. "If we're lucky we'll have two more hours at most."

Carver nodded curtly and pulled on a pair of gloves. "I want to get a look before you and Barnes go over her thoroughly."

He spotted Garrett speaking with an older officer named Elijah Hull and judging by Hull's gesticulations the discussion was heated and the older man didn't seem at all pleased with what Garrett had to say. Hull looked like an ape, Carver thought uncharitably. He was a grizzled officer with a gut far overhanging his belt, a mat of white chest hair that bulged over his undershirt, and a red face as wide as it was long. Hull was five years from retirement and had a reputation for acting first and thinking later. It was a habit that crawled over every last one of Carver's nerves.

Not for the first time, Carver ground his teeth and wished he was back in San Francisco, where he wasn't surrounded by idiots. How had he grown up among these people? "Garrett!" he shouted over at the pair. "In case you've forgotten, this is a crime scene. Stop your jawing and get over here!"

Hull dropped his arms and turned toward the sound of Carver's voice with a huff of disdain. Carver scowled right back. He looked at Hull and the officers standing around him and something in him snapped. He growled, "Go _do_ something. Anything. This goes for all of you. Talk to witnesses. _Find _witnesses!" His voice rose and his hands went to his hips, hooking in his pockets. "Take a look at the beach and figure out how he got her here. What did he use to bury her? _Go find out who the fuck she is! _ Do some police work. For the love of….don't just stand there! Go! And don't fuck it up!" He waved them off dismissively and then turned his back.

Garrett glanced back at Hull only briefly before she joined Carver next to the girl's body. "I can explain," she began but Carver shook his head.

"Doesn't matter. This matters." They exchanged a glance. "Watch me, and if you see something I don't, let me know."

Garrett nodded as Carver gingerly stepped over an evidence bag near the girl's corpse and bent - for once barely feeling the sliver of pain that trailed down his left leg at the movement - to lean in for a closer look. He took his time, starting at her torso and trunk. He noted a series of abrasions and surface scratches across her breasts, and a few deeper ones along her abdomen. A broken piece of green-leafed twig was lodged in one of the deeper ones. So she hadn't been killed here, he thought and lifted his head to scan the barren, rocky beach. She'd been brought here. But why?

He moved down the girl's nude body slowly, knowing better than to touch her even with his gloved hands. The same types of abrasions that laced her abdomen were on her knees and he concentrated on them with a clinical eye, but he had to fight the urge to cover her and give her some dignity. She had been lying exposed now for hours, he supposed, and though he struggled for a determined detachment, he avoided looking at her face. He didn't know if he could, again.

Garrett had begun her study on the girl's hands. "Hey….she's holding something." The auburn-haired detective bent closer and then gasped, jerking back in surprise.

Emmett looked up.

Garrett was kneeling, leaning heavily on her hands, next to the girl's left fist. "She's got her eyes in her hand, Emmett. Oh, Jesus. _Her eyes, Emmett._ Jesus." She waved over at the girl's other hand and her voice sounded thready. "And her _tongue_ in her other hand." She glanced up at him and her pupils were dilated in shock. "What the fuck, Emmett?"

The breath wooshed out of Carver's lungs. He sat back on his haunches and shrugged his shoulders helplessly at her. "I don't know, Garrett," he said, his voice thick and gravelly, "but it's our job to find out. For _her_. Whoever she is."

Garrett nodded and then rose to her feet. "I need to get some air," she said. Carver just nodded and waved her off and when she left, he planted his hands on his knees and dropped his chin onto his chest. He took a couple more deep breaths. Come on, Carver, he said to himself again after a few minutes. Almost done. You've got to get this done before the tide comes in.

Emmett crawled forward again and glanced at the girl's neck, skipping past the rictus grin to land instead on the gaping wound near her carotid. He studied the wound carefully, noting it was a clean slice, until something out of place caught his eye. Something thin and dark was lodged in the wound. He frowned, leaning in closer. Yes, there was definitely something in the wound. He reached for the evidence bag and dug around within until he found a pair of straight point tweezers. He ran the tip of the instrument alongside the path of the wound, and when the tip hooked on something, Carver immediately froze.

He whistled to get the attention of lead CSI Gordon Barnes and gestured for the balding, heavy-set man to join him. Barnes handed his camera to a fellow officer and lowered himself down to Carver's side with surprising dexterity given his girth.

"What do you think this is?" Carver said quietly and showed Barnes the tip of the tweezers.

Barnes bent closer. "It looks like a….hm. A chain? A necklace, perhaps?"

Carver nodded. He slid the tip of the tweezers under the thin metal and pulled. The chain separated slowly from the sticky, coagulated mess of her wound and Carver slid the tweezers along the chain until he had extracted the rest of the necklace from within it. It felt heavy, much too heavy for a simple chain, and Carver wondered if it wasn't a pendant necklace. But where was the pendant?

Emmett continued to pull carefully, and Barnes leaned in to assist. The CSI lifted the girl's neck and her head lolled dangerously in his hands. Emmett's stomach turned. He'd known it, hadn't he? But he kept pulling on the chain until it loosened with a sickening pop. He grasped the pendant with the tweezers and pulled it around until it rested between her breasts. Barnes lowered her back down onto the sand, gently, as if placing her in a bed.

But Emmett wasn't really paying attention to Barnes. His gaze was riveted on the pendant necklace she wore – a violet cameo on a thin black beaded chain, etched with a black rose.


	4. Chapter 4

_Chapter Four – DI Alec Hardy_

Monday, 18 January, 10:43 am

In the ten minutes it had taken Alec Hardy to walk home to his tiny two-room flat, he'd uttered every curse word he could remember and had made up a bevy of colorful new ones besides. He stepped over the landing and let himself in, shaking his coat loose from his bony shoulders. He tossed it over onto the coat rack near the door, rubbed his chilled hands together, and went looking for a snifter of scotch.

It's not even noon, Alec, he admonished himself even as he poured two solid fingers of the potent amber liquid into the glass. Is this really what it's come to? The bottle made a soft clink on the mirror-topped bar as he put it down. He lifted the tumbler to his lips but hesitated, swirling the liquid around and around without tasting it as he pondered the trip he'd just made. No one would hire him. Not even here. So, he supposed, that was exactly what it'd come to.

With the first sip a rush of peaty fire caused his chest to bloom with a warmth that made him close his eyes and sigh.

He didn't hesitate again.

Ten minutes and two empty glasses later, Alec was still standing at his corner bar. Warmth had loosened his limbs and settled into the tips of his fingers and toes and if he concentrated he could feel a slight sway in his stance. He knew he had the scotch to thank for that. A ghost of a smile played around the corner of his mouth. You're a real lightweight, Hardy, he taunted himself.

A few pearls of leftover scotch clung to the edges of the glass. He arched an eyebrow and raised the tumbler to his lips, skimming his tongue over the rim and savoring the dregs of the smoky liquor with half-closed eyes. Before his surgery, liquor had been absolutely off-limits. Bollocks to that, he grumbled. It hadn't mattered a tinker's damn in the end. His bloody ticker had almost done him in with or without it.

Hardy put the empty glass down on the bar with a snap. He was warm and languid and there was a pleasant fuzzy quality to his every move. He was grinning too, something he knew he didn't do as a rule. Hell, he hadn't felt this good since…..well, since he'd worked his way through the first half of the scotch.

He glanced again at the liquor bottle and his mouth watered. He really wanted another drink. He knew he shouldn't, unless he planned to keep at it and stay drunk the rest of the day. He ran a hand through his hair, then brought both to his face and rubbed the stubble at his jaw with a sigh. He had to admit the thought held a certain appeal.

After a moment's hesitation, he poured himself another two fingers.

As he drank, the liquor-infused warmth gliding through his veins was more than enough to flush his cheeks and heat his blood. It was a good thing, too, because his flat was positively chilly. It was cheap and clean but nowhere near insulated enough for the cold northern England winters. He contemplated stoking the fire he'd left burning earlier that morning but had enough good sense left to know that feeling like he did, he might not want to pick up a match or a lighter. Hmm, he mused, maybe he could light the damn fire with his breath. He giggled, then caught himself. Holy mother of Christ. Giggling?

The reclining chair near the fireplace had a quilt on it that his ex-wife Melanie had made years before. The multicolored pattern looked cozy and inviting. How's that for irony, he snorted. Neither word reminded him of Melanie at all, and she certainly wasn't the quilter type. Quilters were supposed to be motherly, loving nurturers, and Melanie had never been either even in the full ripeness of her pregnancy with Daisy. She'd joined some quilting club organized by the Sandbrook DCI's wife - who had been one of those women who believed quilting was next to godliness – to get into her good graces. Alec couldn't recall if Melanie had managed it or not, but probably not. She'd never made another quilt.

Hardy drained the glass in one long swallow and put it down, then flung himself away from the bar before he could pour himself another one. He shuffled unsteadily toward the chair and wrapped the quilt around his shoulders, draping the extra across his thighs. He pulled his chin into the fabric and the liquor and his own body heat did the rest. Soon he was drifting into a comfortable drowse.

Some time later he opened his eyes. He'd nodded off. He had no idea how long he'd been asleep but the flat was drenched in shadows so he judged he'd been out for at least a couple of hours. He rubbed his eyes, yawning and stretching experimentally, and ignored the shrieking of his stiff muscles. The quilt slipped off his shoulders with his movement and Alec shivered and pushed it back up as fast as he could. Christ, but it's cold in here, he groused and dipped his nose back into the quilt. He wasn't going to be able to sit here much longer no matter how lovely the idea sounded. He was hungry, he needed to piss something awful, and he was going to have to bite the bullet and fire up the radiators no matter how much the bloody electric cost him. Bollocks.

He hauled himself out of the recliner and the world did a bit of a spin. Whoa there, fellow, he chuckled, catch on. He snatched the back of the chair for balance and let the spin settle out before he hustled to the loo.

Upon his return he rustled up some food – a leftover pasty and some chips – and downed them while he fired up the radiators. He bolted down a couple of glasses of frigid water from the tap and settled back into the recliner to wait for the house to warm up. He threw the quilt over him and his sock-clad feet stuck out of the blanket at opposing angles. One of his toenails was sticking partially out from a rip in his left sock and although he tried to ignore it, after a while he found his gaze jerking back to it again and again. He couldn't seem to stop himself.

Sort of like his response to _anything_ he got his teeth into, he sighed. He saw things that were out of sorts and then couldn't ignore them. That kind of doggedness made him a good detective. _Had_ made him a good detective, he corrected himself sourly. You'd think the quality would serve him well in his relationships with people, but people were much more complicated. They had emotions. You couldn't just go in and fix something and expect it to stay fixed. Things could be broken, however right they looked from the outside. It was a landscape that Alec just didn't know how to navigate and he was usually wrong when he tried. So over time he learned it was just easier to ignore or avoid people than it was to figure them out. What was it he'd told Ellie Miller once, back before her entire life fell apart? _People are unknowable_? Well, they were.

Miller. Alec smiled to himself. It had been nice seeing her again even though the circumstances were as painful as they could've imagined. A few weeks prior, on the morning of her ex-husband Joe's trial at the Guildhall in Bristol, the two of them had met up around the corner of the court building for coffee and a pastry. After they'd settled at a table and ordered he'd asked after the boys, Tom and Fred. Ellie told him that her sister Lucy was watching them at her hotel and Alec was surprised. He'd been certain Tom would have to testify. Ellie had shaken her head with the same stubborn cast to her features he'd seen often while working with her. She'd insisted the barrister proceed to court with Tom's videotaped statement instead. The barrister hadn't been happy, but he'd made do.

Alec hid his amusement behind his coffee cup.

Ellie nibbled on a pastry. She was nervous about taking the stand and drummed her fingers on the tabletop while she drained cup after cup of coffee and worried aloud how anyone would be able to believe she didn't know. Alec let her talk, and let her drink, and then gently pointed out that she might want to consider easing off the coffee. She wouldn't be able to get up and pop off to the loo in the middle of her testimony.

She sputtered with laughter and he was startled when she reached across the table to squeeze the top of his hand where it rested against his cup. She didn't say anything but her expressive, doe-brown eyes watered up and her smile was rich with gratitude. Alec felt his throat knot up in response. Through everything she still wore her heart on her sleeve. When they'd first met on the beach the day they'd found Danny's body he'd cringed at that. He'd thought it was weakness, but with hindsight? It was her greatest strength. She was resilient in ways he could never hope to be. What you saw was what you got with Ellie Miller. He'd thought about turning his palm over and squeezing her hand in reply, but the moment had passed and so he just sat there blinking at her. It was probably just as well. He was remakably good at awkward.

The trial had gone better than he'd hoped. With Joe's confession and the overwhelming evidence against him, a conviction was almost a given. Ellie handled herself with remarkable poise. Even through her tears, the stark honesty and pain in her demeanor resonated strongly with the jury. Alec was sure he'd seen a few eyes in the jury box well up in sympathy as Ellie apologized to Mark and Beth Latimer for her inability to see what her husband had been capable of. She had been in her way as much a victim of Joe Miller's as Danny had been. Sometimes the closer you were to someone, the less you knew them. That rang true in Ellie's life as much as it had in his, Alec thought.

He'd watched Joe weep and wail his way through his testimony – his barrister had inexplicibly allowed him to testify, perhaps hoping the jury would take pity on his client's obvious instability – with sickening disgust. Alec's own testimony had been as dry and professional as he could make it but he couldn't help underscoring his words with the anger he'd buried deep in the six months since Joe had been arrested and charged. What Joe had done to the Latimer family by strangling Danny was reprehensible, but what he had done to his own family was equally so. He only had to glance at Ellie to see the fallout on her face.

While they waited for the verdict he'd stopped to speak with the Latimers - Mark and Beth and their daughter Chloe. Mark and Beth were holding hands and Alec thought they'd made great strides in the last six months in putting their family back together. Beth was in the last stages of her pregnancy and leaned backward as she walked, one hand on her lower back. Her face was pale with the stress of the trial but still held the glow of an expectant mother. He fervently wished that the child would bring the Latimers even closer together. As he went back to his seat later he saw Ellie speaking to Beth and to his relief it looked as if the two women were back on speaking terms. He knew how difficult it had been for Beth to accept that Ellie hadn't known about Joe.

It hadn't taken the jury long in deliberations to return a verdict of guilty and to pass sentence. Joe wouldn't be seeing the outside of a prison cell for a very long time. The courtroom exploded and Alec was basked in the familiar glow of humanity reacting to justice; there were wolf whistles, and backs were pounded. But through the merriment that surrounded him Alec knew that he and Ellie were still trapped on the same merry-go-round. He stood next to her as Joe was taken out of the courtroom. Ellie was stiff, struggling to keep her face expressionless and hide the mourning she wished desperately not to feel, but that couldn't help but haunt her. She had loved him once.

Alec had swallowed. He wanted to take her elbow or even enfold her in his arms. But he didn't. He knew she'd break if he did, and he didn't want anyone to see her shatter. She didn't deserve that.

And as for him? He bit his lip, waiting to feel better about it than he did. The anger simmering within him had been appreased by the verdict and sentence, but to his surprise he wasn't as satisfied as he thought he would be. He needed more. What he wanted was to see Joe punished good and proper. He wanted retribution. He wanted…..

Alec sniffed, and realized it was warm enough in the house to shed the quilt. He pushed the blanket off and leaned back into the chair. He didn't really want to think about what he'd _really_ wanted. Seeing Joe Miller brought to justice hadn't solved a thing. There was still a seeping wound in him that had nothing to do with Joe Miller. The wound was Archie Joyce, the bastard who'd got away. It was Pippa Gillespie, Libby Hammond, Isabel Field. The victims of Sandbrook. People he'd let down. Alec knew a thing or two about mourning someone not worthy of the emotion, someone who you thought you knew. Someone who could reach in and claw out your heart and make you question every judgment you'd ever made. He'd sacrified his career and his reputation for the woman who'd lost evidence at a cheap motel, and he was – God help him - still mourning her. He'd done it for his daughter and to try to preserve whatever relationship Daisy had with her mother, he told himself. And he had. But he'd done it for Melanie as well. No. He couldn't fault Ellie at all for both loving _and_ hating Joe.

Packaging the anger had made him sick, or more likely just lit the fuse of a timebomb he hadn't realized was already ticking away in his chest. Oh, he was still alive, and that was thanks to the pacemaker surgery Ellie practically forced him to have at the point of a gun. They'd sewn up his chest, but they hadn't quite fixed his heart.

Alec allowed himself a small smile. Maybe that part was up to him now.

He shifted in the chair and ran a hand across his face. He hoped that was going to be easier to do from now on. There was no denying he owed a debt of gratitude to Ollie and Maggie, those two nosy Broadchurch Echo reporters. In the days before he'd arrested Joe they'd cornered him in their office, ostensibly to blackmail him about his ill health, and sprung Sandbrook on him as well. He'd instinctively recoiled and opened his mouth to give them both what for, but Ollie's heartfelt appeal that he couldn't keep it secret forever made him stop before he had. They were right. He couldn't keep it secret any longer. It was killing him. So to his own astonishment, he told them. It came out of him in fits and starts, the painful words rubbing him raw like sliding down sandpaper. When it was over he'd felt wrung out, but strangely lighter for it.

Reporters. He shook his head. Of all the types to pick for a confessional. But people can still surprise you, Alec, he chided himself. They'd done right by him after all and did exactly as he'd begged them to do. They told the Gillespies, the Hammonds and the Fields first before publishing the story, and they hadn't published Melanie's name. What they _had_ published, however, was the reason he owed them.

When he woke up from his surgery he squinted up at the face that was swimming in front of him and was sure he'd died and gone to heaven, despite bewildering odds against it. He hadn't seen that face in years, except in school pictures Melanie sent along, but it was so much like his own he would've recognized it anywhere. Lancing pain shot through his surgical incision when he moved but he latched his hands onto his teenaged daughter's forearms anyway. "Daisy," he'd croaked.

"Da," she had whispered back, using the pet name for him he hadn't heard her use since he and her mother had split. She stood blinking away her tears and clutching his hand, pinching his IV enough so that it brought blood. He hadn't even noticed.

Leave it to Miller, Alec snorted in wry amusement. She and the boys had come up to Bristol with him while he was hospitalized prior to his surgery and he'd handed his phone off to her for safekeeping. Ellie had lifted Daisy's number from his phone and called her. He wanted to be angry at Ellie for sticking her nose into his business but she'd only done what he couldn't do. Admit it, Hardy, he said to himself. You were scared. Over the years his calls ended up going to voicemail. He kept calling her, kept trying, but each unanswered call tore a little bit more out of his soul. He'd lost her mother but he'd never imagined he might lose Daisy. It was almost more than he could bear. He remembered how he'd cradled the phone in his hand, thumb hovering over Daisy's number, frightened out of his wits. If he'd called to tell her he might die on the operating table and that call had went unanswered he wouldn't have cared whether or not he made it through surgery alive. He hadn't wanted to lose the last thread of hope that kept him clinging to this world. He'd never made the call.

But Ellie had, and Daisy ended her self-imposed freeze out. She came down on the train from Penrith, a full five hours from Bristol, to see him through his surgery and the first few days of his recovery. It had been awkward at first. They didn't really know each other, and he could hardly fathom that the willowy brown-eyed brunette sitting at the edge of his bed, shapely legs crossed in a skirt that just touched her knees, was the young pigtailed girl he remembered. His years as a homicide detective had filled him to the brim with the horrors of the world. He wanted to tell her to wear her skirts longer, and to ride on the train with someone she knew instead of going alone, but he bit down hard on those thoughts before they formed words. His sixteen year old daughter, he knew, would not appreciate them.

The Broadchurch Echo piece had been picked up by the nationals, and he learned Daisy had read about the circumstances surrounding the Sandbrook case when she brought it up the morning before she was to catch her train back to Penrith. He told her what he felt he could. He didn't say that it had been Melanie who'd been the DS who'd lost the evidence – even after all this time he was still protecting Melanie - but at least Daisy knew it hadn't been him. By the time she left the two of them had managed to establish a tentative truce. She bent and kissed him on the cheek before she left. He made her promise to call him while she was on the train. She had.

Alec stretched, then got up and made himself a pot of tea, hoping the caffeine would take the edge off the slight headache he was beginning to develop as the scotch wore off. He leaned on the counter while he waited for the kettle light to come on and scratched his chin.

Living in Sandbrook in the aftermath of the failed investigation had been a nightmare. The police force splintered. Their suspect, Archie Joyce, who had never been named in the press and whose prints they had on the pendant, took the opportunity and quietly disappeared.

The families of the victims were traumatized, and angry, and vindictive. The whole town became a mob. The constant whispers in the streets, the toliet paper strewn over their house….and finally, the death threats. Melanie couldn't get away fast enough. She filed for divorce and ran off to Penrith with Daisy before the ink had even been dry on his statement to his superiors.

When he walked up the steps of the constabulary to face the tabloid frenzy and took the blame publicly he was put on suspension without pay pending investigation. A dozen coppers put in their resignations as a show of "protest" against his retention, including DS Miles Rensler - the man whom Melanie had been with the night she lost the pendant that had shattered Alec's world. Rensler was from Penrith. It didn't take Alec long to figure out why Melanie had chosen the place.

The kettle light blinked and Alec fixed himself a cup of tea and dug around in the cabinet to find some aspirin. He took both back to his chair and sunk down once again. He let the pill dissolve on his tongue and drank the scalding tea, blowing on it slowly. Kendal was about forty minutes south of Penrith and it was the reason Alec found himself in Kendal now. He wanted to be as close to his daughter as he could without living in the same town.

He'd thought he could get a job here in Kendal and manage to make do. He'd spent the last couple of months cooped up in this flat and the prospect of waiting another couple of months before Stanley would consider hiring him was demoralizing. His compulsory severance pay was still valid, at least. He snorted as he thought the word and nearly spilled his tea. Compulsory indeed. They were required to pay him because they hadn't terminated him. When they tried to take away his severence they'd nearly had to escort him physically out of the station in Sandbrook. It was the only time that he'd become violent.

He sighed. He had another six months before the severence, too, ran out. He wasn't flush with cash by any means. One look around this dingy flat was enough to see that. He could just about make ends meet if he used what meager savings he still had. He needed that job. If he couldn't work, then what the devil would he do? Not for the first time he felt restless and adrift. Going to see Stanley had been a shot in the dark.

The phone rang and it took Alec a moment or two to remember where he'd put it. In his jacket pocket. He stood up, made his way over to the coat rack, and dug the phone out from the inside pocket. He didn't bother to look at the number as he collapsed back into his chair.

"Hardy."

"Da?"

Hovering as it was on the edge between girlhood and womanhood, his daughter's hesitant voice sent a surge of grateful tenderness rocketing through his veins. "Daisy, honey! How are you?" Bloody hell, Hardy, he grumped to himself the moment he heard his own voice, you're going to scare her away if you sound too pathetic.

"Fine." A pause. "Are you busy?"

Alec felt a sudden, inexplicable spurt of unease. "No, darlin," he said immediately and sat up straighter in his chair. The residual buzz from the Scotch made his voice gruff and his burr thicken with concern. "Is somethin' the matter? Are you okay?"

"No." Something in her flat, dissociative tone sent alarm bells sounding in his head. He recognized it. It was the same one _he_ used when he was beyond the white-hot immediacy of fury. "I'm tired of being treated like a kid. Everyone's just been lying, or not telling, which is the same thing." She dragged in a breath and then plunged forward. "Everyone seems to think I can't deal with the truth, and I've had it. So I need someone….no, I need _you, _Da….to tell me the truth. It was mum, wasn't it?"

Alec's mouth went dry. He didn't have to ask her what she meant. He knew. His heart begin to triphammer and for a moment he was concerned his pacemaker was going to give up the ghost. For a moment, he wished it would.

He couldn't begin to guess how she'd figured it out. But how long had she known? He cast his mind back to the interview he'd given the Herald right before he'd arrested Joe Miller for Danny Latimer's murder and picked it apart for anything that would've given her a clue. Had she known when she came to visit him that first time after his surgery? Surely she hadn't, or wouldn't she have confronted him with it then?

He knew she was seething inwardly at being lied to. Even from a young age, Daisy wouldn't scream and cry when she was angry. She'd go cold and sit with folded arms, accusing eyes and an air of disappointment far beyond her years. She was just like him, he thought miserably.

Daisy's raspy, expectant breathing echoed over the line and he realized he hadn't answered her yet. He knew what she needed, and he knew if he didn't give it to her, he'd lose her for good. He clutched the phone to his ear and shut his eyes. Through the tightness in his throat, he managed to whisper, "Yes."

She was silent, digesting. He could hear his breath whistling through his nose.

"Thank you," she finally said.

Alec was dizzy with relief. She hadn't immediately hung up on him. His throat worked and he knew he should say something, but he couldn't seem to get the words out. All he could manage was a grunt.

A pause. "Is that all you're gonna say about it?"

He closed his eyes.

"Da?"

He grasped in the silence for the right words. He'd never been good at this, and he knew she was looking for some explanation he wasn't sure he could give her. He wasn't sure that he'd ever understood it himself. He had made all the excuses and they sounded good enough, but that's all they'd ever been. Excuses. He hadn't wanted to face that he just ran away from feeling betrayed and embarrassed. He wasn't sure where the urge to protect Melanie ended and where defending himself began. Maybe he was tired of trying to hold up a sinking ship. It had almost cost him everything. He told suspects all the time that unburdening themselves was the surest way to relief. He told his detectives that's what all guilty people wanted to secretly do – get things off their chest.

Daisy was right. Maybe it was time to just let go. Relinquish control. Maybe his daughter was old enough to handle it now. Maybe it was time to really come clean.


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter 5: Chapter Five – DI Alec Hardy

_Monday, 18 January, 5:43 pm_

As soon as he thought about coming clean Alec felt something within him start to break loose from its moorings. He was about to pull that bottom card out of the stack and watch the house he'd so carefully constructed come tumbling down. Telling Ollie and Maggie had been a struggle. Telling Daisy? Panic fluttered in his chest. There was a sense of relief but underneath that there was fear. The bedrock of his life - everything he'd done the past five years, the reasons he'd done them, in fact the very core of what kept him going - was shifting underneath him and his world felt slippery. He'd sacrificed so much in the name of it. Was he ready to let it go, and try to reinvent himself?

He cleared his throat. "I suppose it's time you knew, aye." Then, "How did you find out?" he blurted with his customary lack of tact. Bloody hell, he swore to himself and clenched his teeth. Not an auspicious beginning.

"I overheard Mum and Miles having a row. I came home early from drama and they were out in the sunroom drinking wine and hissing at each other. Mum was waving the paper around and calling you all sorts of names. Said she should've known you'd never keep your mouth shut, and something needed to be done or Miles would lose any chance of being elected." The last five words were laced with scorn.

"Being elected? Elected for what?"

"Is that important?"

Alec was silent. It shouldn't be. But it was.

Daisy sighed. "He's campaigning for Deputy Chief Constable and the post nominations come up next month."

Alec hissed out a breath as a streak of righteous fury shot through him. Deputy Chief Constable was an elected position nominated by the Chief Constable. The Cumbrian constabulary, of which Kendal was a part, was divided into three basic command units – North, South, and West. Kendal was in the South and Penrith the North, but the Deputy Chief Constable had authority over them all. If Miles Rensler was jockeying for the Deputy seat and got it, he'd come to the eye of the Police and Crime Commissioner and become a candidate for the top job.

Alec thought back to his earlier appeal in Stanley's office and tasted the bile of humiliation in the back of his throat. The man had dogged his life for five years. It was bad enough that Miles had been raising his daughter, a fact that festered like an ulcer in the pit of his stomach. It was another thorn in his side entirely that while Alec's career had taken a nosedive in the wake of Sandbrook, Rensler's had only escalated. Rensler had moved to Penrith after resigning from Sandbrook and was welcomed there as the copper who'd "done the right thing." He'd worked his way up through the ranks with astonishing speed. Miles wasn't a DCC yet, but was it possible he was the real reason behind Stanley's dismissal of his petition earlier today? Could he have had a hand in making sure Alec didn't get the job?

But why? What would Miles stand to gain by sabotaging Alec's job? If anyone had leverage in this situation, surely it was Alec. Alec had only to tell the papers that Melanie had been the DS who lost the evidence and Miles had been the lover she'd been meeting and any chance Miles would have of being nominated would disintegrate in the wake of the ensuing scandal. But, Alec sighed, he'd talked to the Echo already and he may have spooked the couple into thinking it was only a matter of time before he told the truth and nothing but the truth. Alec wasn't sure when Daisy had overheard Melanie and Miles. If it had been weeks ago, there was every chance Miles was trying a preemptive strike. Could Miles be that spiteful? Maybe it was just Alec's own smoldering jealousy that made him contemplate the possibility.

Alec had to put the stop to that line of thought. His daughter was waiting. "Oh, I see." He realized he sounded disgruntled and made an effort to push it out of his tone. "Okay," he said diplomatically, "why don't you tell me what you think you know?"

"Why?" Daisy burst out in exasperation. "So you can figure out what you have to tell me and what you can leave out? I've had quite enough of that from mum!"

"Okay, okay...fair enough," Alec assured her quickly. He could clearly see she wouldn't be put off. While the ever-present fear began to rise in him the same way it did every time anyone came close to this part of him, there was another part that couldn't help but feel an intense pride. His little girl was no pushover. But this was too big for a phone call and he hoped she would see that. He needed to see her face when he told her, and he needed her to see his. "I dinnae want you to think I'm putting you off, girl," he started hesitantly, his burr clogged with dread. "Please dinnae think that. I just don't...och, Daisy. It's too much for a phone call. I mean, this should be face to face. You deserve that."

Daisy sighed. "I see. So what do you want to do?"

He rolled his tongue over the front of his teeth. "I could come up. To Penrith. We could go have a coffee."

"And then you'll tell me? You promise?"

He leaned forward at the waist, resting his elbow on his thigh. She sounded so young. How could he make her understand? He didn't know, but he'd have to try. Somehow. "Aye."

There was a silence as Daisy seemed to weigh whether she should place her trust in his word. "All right, Da. When and where?"

_Wednesday, 20 January, 1:16 pm_

Hardy eyed his coffee cup and chewed at a space on his lip that had already seen plenty of abuse on his early afternoon train to Penrith from Kendal. It was sore. He winced, then tongued it soothingly as he stared down into his steaming cup. He'd had plenty of time on the train to sit and think about what he would say to Daisy. He'd thought and thought about it - hence the sore lip – but he still hadn't reached a satisfactory answer. He hated winging it but he was afraid that was exactly what he was going to have to do. Daisy had chosen a small coffeehouse on Devonshire Street for their meeting and he'd had such a bugger of a time finding it, he feared he'd be late. But even with the train ride up and the almost fruitless search down narrow cobblestoned streets, he'd arrived before she had.

He ordered a pot of coffee and a few pastries and chose the table farthest away from the others, an upstairs corner table for two near a gas-powered hearth filled with ceramic logs. He took a seat while a kindly middle-aged hostess whose faded blue eyes were hidden behind silver-rimmed spectacles brought his cup and saucer up and set up his service before returning to the ground floor. A few guests were downstairs and their voices blended together into a low indistinct hum that muffled their clinking silverware. With luck, any conversation he and Daisy had would sound the same from down below.

He studied the fireplace. It crackled and popped and though he knew it was artificial ambiance, he appreciated the sound as well as the heat. He could clearly see it had once been a working wood-burning fireplace that the proprietors had converted to gas. The logs were remarkably realistic piles of burning wood. It churned out an impressive amount of heat, something he was grateful for given the icy walk he'd made from the train station. He was just beginning to warm up enough to shed his coat and feel the tip of his nose.

His cup, a delicate porcelain shell in bone and mauve, rattled a bit in its saucer and he frowned at it until he realized his nervously bouncing leg was shaking the table. He planted his hand on his knee and stilled it with an effort. Perhaps he should've chosen decaffeinated coffee, he thought with a wry twist to his lips. He was certainly jumpy enough already. His fingers felt large and clumsy against the thin handle as he lifted the cup to his lips for a sip.

The bell on the front door chimed and Hardy's heart leaped into his throat and lodged there. Dropping his cup down into the saucer with a clatter, he stood up and peered through the balustrade down into the central room. He saw Daisy and opened his mouth to call down to her but reconsidered when he caught sight of her paused in the doorway, removing her coat and hat. He watched her, the lump in his throat turning into one of awe and pride. As she smoothed down the waves in her hair he noted she had a grace in her movements that reminded him painfully of Melanie when they'd first started dating. He didn't want to dwell on the fact that Melanie had been only a few years older than Daisy when they'd first started seeing each other, and he _certainly_ didn't care to think about what other men might be thinking when they looked at his daughter. He scowled. Melanie had never seemed young, even when she had been. At least Daisy retained a youthfulness about her.

She looked up and saw him and he sent her a little wave and a tentative smile. She wore a dark sweater with a olive green skirt, black leggings, and calf-length black boots she'd pushed down until they rested at her ankles. A smile lit up her face and she threw her coat over her arm and took the stairs two at a time. She dropped her coat on the chair next to his and rose on her toes to give him a quick peck on the cheek. Her scent swirled in the air around him. Some sort of soft musk.

"Hello, darlin'," he murmured. "I've got us a pot of coffee. And some pastries, too, if you're hungry." He settled into the chair and reached for his cup. Daisy sank into the chair beside him.

"Sorry I was late, Da," Daisy said softly. She picked up the sugar and stirred a teaspoon into her cup. "I had to dodge last class."

Alec glanced up from his cup. "Ye're skipping classes now?"

Daisy's expression went from sunny to stormy. "Ye're giving me lectures now?" she shot back. Their eyes met and for a moment, Alec thought he saw the remnants of redness lining her eyes. A jolt of concern shot through him and he clamped his lips together before he said something else he might regret. Daisy looked down and sipped her coffee. "It's easier to get away in the middle of the day than later on in the evening during school week. I didn't want to take the chance Mum would notice if I tried to slip out." A muscle jumped in her cheek. "And besides, you have to catch a train back and they don't run late."

Alec tongued his back molars thoughtfully and eyeballed the top of his daughter's head. "Aye, okay. Point taken. So I'll take it your mum doesn't know you're here." It was a statement, not an accusation. "I suppose that's a good thing. She wouldn't like you and I having this discussion."

Daisy raised her head and her lip curled in disdain. "You bet she wouldn't."

Now that the moment was upon him Alec felt a little faint. He had to work to steady his hand as he topped up his cup and Daisy's. He couldn't recall feeling this nervous about anything since he'd asked Melanie to marry him. "Go on, then," he said quietly as he poured the coffee. Watching it flow into the cup was easier than meeting her eye. "Ask me. What do you want to know?"

He put the pot down and let the silence linger between them for a minute, taking advantage of it to draw in a few deep calming breaths. Then he leaned back in his chair and folded his arms.

Daisy took a sip of her coffee, awkwardly, keeping tabs on him out of the corner of her eye as she did so. Then she twisted in her chair, the coffee cup nestled in her palm. For an instant her face opened up and she was his little girl again, looking at him with utter devotion and trust, but as quickly as it had appeared her expression closed and left him wondering if he'd seen it at all.

"Why did you lie? Why did you take the blame for _her_, when _she_ was the one who cheated on _you_?"

There it was. The big question. Trust Daisy to take after him so much and cut to the chase so quickly. "For you," he heard himself saying.

"For me." She repeated the words with disbelief.

He nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

Daisy stared at him a moment. Her eyes were tracing his face, looking for something. He couldn't imagine she wouldn't see the tremble in his lips, or how the blood had drained from his face. The hollows in his cheeks. The way his eyes held a silent entreaty. He could feel all of it resting on top of his skin like a mask. Surely she saw it, too? But her lips thinned and she shook her head slowly. "That's a shit answer."

He blinked at her in utter incredulity.

"It _is_," she insisted, still shaking her head. "You left me with her. You let me think…." and she swallowed, looking away from him down at the table. "You let me hate you. What's more, you would've let me _keep_ hating you. And you might've even _died_ without giving me the chance to know the truth! How is any of that doing what's best for me?"

Alec leaned forward, pressing the palms of his hands together between his knees. Underneath all the frustration and fear a tendril of anger fueled by hurt and guilt was beginning to curl through him. He tried to keep the emotion out of his tone but winced when he heard the grating hint of accusation in his voice. "I tried. I kept calling. You kept dodging me."

"I know I did!" Daisy clamped down on her jaw and cast her eyes downward, then reached for her coffee cup. She took a few stabilizing sips before speaking again. When she did her voice was so soft Alec had to lean forward to hear her. "The thing is, I was so used to hating you. It felt _normal_. I was used to you not being in my life and I didn't want you there. I was led to believe you chose a life without me or mum so any time you tried to get in touch it felt like you were trying to have your cake and eat it too, or …or…." she waved a hand in the air, "…maybe it was just guilt. I didn't know, but I wasn't going to play that game. It wasn't until Ellie called and I learned you might die that I really had to think about what I might lose if I didn't come. So I'm sorry for what I did, Da. I _should've_ answered you."

Alec pressed his lips together and looked down at his clasped palms. His heart ached at her words and all his old resentment and frustrated anger came boiling to the surface. He tried his best to swallow it down. Alec knew he wasn't angry at Daisy. She'd been a child. But Melanie? Melanie was another story. His resentment and humiliation….and guilt, Alec, he said to himself, don't forget the guilt….still lingered. He'd worn all of them for so long they'd sunk their claws in deep. They'd be bloody hard to remove. But Daisy hadn't tried to deny or justify her actions. She hadn't tried to shift the blame. She'd accepted her part in their estrangement. If she could see past her own hurt and anger, he thought, the least he could do was try and do the same.

With a short nod, Alec said, "It's all right, darlin.' None of that matters now. And I didn't tell you about my heart, because I didn't want you to come because you felt you had to."

Daisy scooted her chair closer and reached for his hand. Alec's heart lurched. He remembered when she was a little girl and he would sweep her up in his arms and bury his face in her neck, his scratchy beard sending her into fits of giggles. He'd missed that closeness with an intensity akin to physical pain. When her fingers curled around his and she looked into his eyes, brown gaze meeting brown, he was undone. His anger evaporated.

"I've had the last four months since you got out of hospital to think about all we talked about when you were there. We worked all that out and I think I understand it now." Daisy squeezed his hand and took a breath. "But you didn't tell me in hospital that it was mum. You left that part out, and I'm a little cross at you about that," she said carefully, trying her best to keep her voice steady and without accusation. "I thought we were past the whole protecting me thing and we were being honest with each other. And I'm _definitely_ cross at mum." Her lips pursed in disdain. "So let's start again. Tell me the things I don't know. Don't treat me like a child and don't cover things up you don't think I need to hear. You did all that and we've lost _years_, Da."

Daisy cocked an eyebrow at Alec and looked at him entreatingly until he gave her a lopsided, hesitant grin and a decisive nod. She pushed a lock of hair behind her ear. "So," she said as she reached over and poured them both another cup, draining the last of the coffee. "Start from the beginning." She placed the empty pot on the table. "The _very _beginning."

Alec nodded again and jabbed a finger toward the coffeepot. "This might take a while. You'd best get us another refill."

From the moment Alec had seen Melanie standing with the other newly inducted Rosemont police officers his gut told him she was trouble waiting to happen. She was lush and curvaceous and even the plain white police uniform couldn't dim the underlying luster of her sensuality. She kept her wavy blonde hair firmly controlled in a sleek French twist under her white bowler hat. Her almond eyes were cool and assessing, heavily lidded and thickly lashed. The elder beat coppers with their barely concealed leers and their raucous chatter didn't seem to intimidate her in the slightest. Her chin jutted proudly just a few inches north of normal as she stood at attention with a small satisfied smile.

As the station's most senior detective, Alec tried his best not to stare at her. Melanie caught his surreptitious glances her way with a knowing smirk. A stab of mortification went through him at the idea that she might lump him in with the other coppers in the station. Alec could feel her appraising him with an up and down flick of her gaze and he stood taller and smoothed down the edges of his slightly rumpled suit. He hadn't bothered to shave that morning and he raised a hand to his face, rubbing a nervous palm over the unkempt stubble. He offered her a hesitant smile that she didn't return. Instead, she just held his eyes until he looked away.

When he learned she was a DS, he was surprised. He'd assumed she was a beat copper given his judge of her age – fresh out of academy, she was probably barely twenty if that – and when he'd seen her in the uniform and hat. He had a momentary spurt of panic when he realized that as a beginning DS she might be assigned to him but she went under another detective instead and for a while things went relatively smoothly. They'd pass each other in the hall, in the station proper, or at staff briefings when the entire constabulary was called in for a particular case. He noted that Melanie made it a point to greet him in the hallway or send him smiles across the station during briefings.

Alec tried to pretend her efforts to engage him went unnoticed but the truth was, he spent most evenings panting and spent under the duvet, and most mornings leaning his head against the shower door taking himself in hand to her image in his mind's eye. Meeting her eyes in the daylight after wanking off to her at night? It wasn't a situation Alec found himself in every day and he felt tongue-tied and out of sorts, like a first year again. He wanted to go up to her and talk, he wanted to stare at her from afar, and he wanted to slink off and avoid her like the plague. She was doing his head in and they hadn't even had a proper conversation.

It didn't help that she turned the station upside down. Alec could hear his fellow officers talk about her as they stood outside puffing on their cigarettes, making lewd comments and gestures, drooling over her like schoolboys on the make. He seethed at their boorishness and wanted to say something or defend her in some way but the hypocrisy behind his feelings made him ill. He knew how he spent his evenings. How could he call them out when he was just like they were?

It wasn't until Melanie's partner took sick leave that they were thrown together on a sexual assault case. By then Alec had all but forgotten his initial assessment of her. Suspects didn't phase him or throw him off his game, but Melanie could….and did. At times flirtatious, at times distant, her hot and cold behavior drew him in like a moth to a flame. He would catch her eyeing him and he'd wonder if she found him as attractive as he found her, but he could never be sure. He felt off balance in her presence and zig-zagged between trying to impress her with his acumen and being self-conscious that he was coming off as too unsophisticated. He didn't quite know what to make of her. She laughed at all his jokes, she seemed warm and empathic to the family members of the rape victim, and she was certainly capable and intelligent. When the two of them finally brought in the suspected perpetrator Alec stood back and watched her as she used her considerable talents to catch the suspect in a lie. She impressed him, and that wasn't an easy accomplishment.

A couple of months after the case was closed Alec resigned himself to the fact that he wasn't going to get her out of his mind. He didn't want to be one of those coppers who she had to fend off but it was quickly coming to a point where he'd _have_ to ask her out to settle the lingering what-if's in his head. More and more often the talk around the water cooler or outside during smoke breaks revolved around how much of a bitch she'd turned out to be. Alec figured it was mostly sour grapes coming from the number of his fellow officers who'd already tried and been turned down flat. He was certain he'd be the next addition to the no chance list, so he was as surprised as the rest of his colleagues were when she said yes. By their third date he was head over heels. They were married at the beginning of the following year.

In retrospect, he should've listened to his gut.

* * *

><p>Alec knew something was fundamentally wrong with his marriage long before Melanie learned she was pregnant. There were little hints here and there he ignored, hoping when she settled in and grew comfortable with their new life together everything would sort itself out. Most of the time he let her outbursts and fits of temper roll off his back. He was used to ignoring the cross words of others – a leftover skill from his own childhood – and he knew she was young, ambitious, and used to getting her own way. Learning to live together would take time.<p>

Melanie had grown up essentially alone, passed back and forth in group care and then onto a few families who turned her back into care when they themselves began a biological family or when their term with her was up. Most of the kids who went through care had a tough time of it but she seemed to be the exception that proved the rule. She had no history of drug abuse, no history of homelessness, and certainly no surfeit of ambition. She'd had a few minor behavioral problems but none that made any impact on her ability to join the Academy. She joined as soon as she was able and excelled in her studies. To all outward appearances she was the perfect poster girl for success against all odds.

Meanwhile, Alec had grown up with parents that fought constantly. His instinctive reaction to domestic disputes was to clam up or ignore and avoid, something that would prove disastrous in his own marriage. He'd been an only child for most of his early childhood, listening to bickering which often devolved into full-blown arguments complete with thrown crockery. He was almost eleven when his little sister Daisy came along. Unlike most other kids his age, Alec became violently protective of her. She represented possibility to him and the relief that he wouldn't be alone in his world. When his parents started in on each other, he'd go into Daisy's room and play games with her or draw pictures. Her little-girl giggles and her utter devotion to him made his troubles melt away.

One day when Daisy was four his mother took them to visit an elderly relative and Alec kept Daisy busy by playing hide and seek. The two of them had fun hiding in closets and under the beds. They'd just arrived home when Daisy began vomiting. His parents thought she'd eaten too much of the rich mincemeat pie they'd had at tea and gave her some bismol and put her to bed. Alec heard his sister coughing a few times during the night.

The next morning he was awakened by his mother's screams. He ran into Daisy's bedroom and his father pushed him out but not before he saw the little girl's bed was streaked with blood. They rushed Daisy to hospital but it was already too late. She died before they could get her to the emergency.

Until the autopsy reports came back Alec's family had no idea what had killed their daughter. The findings pointed to poison – specifically, rat poison. It took them a while to trace back what had happened. While at their elderly relative's house playing hide and seek with Alec, Daisy had crawled under the bed and found colored rat poison pellets spread around the baseboards. The pellets looked so much like the candy necklaces Alec shared with her that she'd eaten all of them as she hid.

Daisy's death tore apart what little was left of Alec's family. His mother Margaret went into a deep depression from which she never resurfaced. Both his parents took to alcohol. His mother added pills. His father turned to other women. The constant arguments abated, something Alec had prayed for continuously for years, but it wasn't the relief he thought it would be. When they weren't having alcohol-fueled screaming matches, an ever-widening chasm of silence filled the spaces that once before had been filled with constant bickering. If anything, Alec thought, it was worse. Any underlying love he'd ever sensed in his parent's voices had disappeared.

Never the most social boy, Alec became even more withdrawn. He understood in a logical way he wasn't at fault for his sister's accidental death, but grief and guilt are like worms that work their way into the mind. They don't need logic to hatch and are insidiously difficult to remove. Alec was simply too young and vulnerable to figure out how to extract them. Instead, they burrowed in and left their permanent mark.

His mother passed away five years later and left twenty year old Alec alone with his father. By then Alastair Hardy was a mean-tempered drunk and Alec had finally had enough. He decided he needed some way to do good in his life and becoming a detective was the best way he found to be able to help people in need, like he could never help Daisy. Alec enrolled in the Academy and did exceptionally well, becoming one of the youngest to graduate in his year. He did his best to take care of his father between attending to his Academy studies but in the end his father's sister Maeve came down from Aberdeen and took his father up to live in the country. Alec visited on occasion but over the years he and his father had less and less to say to each other that didn't end up as an argument.

Finally Alec just stopped visiting. After he and Melanie married he'd taken her up for a visit and to his absolute mortification his father had tried it on with her. She refused to visit again. Alec called his aunt dutifully every couple months to check on his father and sent her a monthly sum from his paycheck. He felt it was the best he could do in the circumstances.

From the start Melanie was a lesson in extremes. Always ambitious, she pursued the life of the wife of a detective like she pursued everything else she wanted. The incident with the quilt had just been one of many. He could see from the outset she was intent upon insinuating herself into Rosemont's upper echelon. She wanted the dinner parties and the golf games, the cocktail mixers and the charity balls. Alec wanted none of that. He winced at using the word trophy but it was the best description he could come up with for how she responded to the trappings surrounding them. She certainly seemed to act the trophy wife, but he also learned she considered him her trophy husband.

People thought she was sweet and charming and warm, that butter couldn't melt in her mouth and she'd help anyone, but it was all an act designed to get her what she wanted. In private she was short-tempered and disdainful, especially of Alec. His career wasn't high status enough. The car they drove didn't quite measure up. Their house was decorated to the hilt and everything was in its place and ordered. From the outside they looked like the perfect family. Inside it was much different. Alec struggled to figure out what would make her happy. He was certain there was a solution to her puzzle if he could just hit upon what it was. In his darker moments it was a notion he clung to.

They'd been married less than a year when she learned she was pregnant. During her pregnancy the façade she struggled to maintain slipped more and more as she succumbed to ever wilder mood swings. They argued more and more. Alec sometimes thought things would've been different if they'd had the chance to get to know each other more before having a child but he knew with hindsight it was nothing but wishful thinking on his part. The Melanie that appeared after giving birth to Daisy – whom they named after his cherished sister after another magnificent row Alec was determined to win - had always been there, simmering under the surface. Pregnancy was merely its trigger point.

And trigger it was. If it were possible, Melanie was even worse with Daisy than she was with him. Alec tried to convince himself that the actuality of Daisy's existence would awaken Melanie's latent maternal instincts but if anything, Daisy's complete dependence upon her had the opposite effect. Melanie was never any good with anyone – or anything – that depended on her. Melanie played the attentive, devoted mother in public but when at home Alec was more often than not the one to care for Daisy's needs.

When Daisy was a toddler Melanie paid little attention to her daughter. She was cool and glassy, demanding, and full of high expectations that Daisy could never quite reach. As Daisy grew into a pre-teen, watching Daisy try and try to please her mother tore at Alec's guts. But in the six months before the Sandbrook case that would destroy everything, Melanie seemed to begin warming to her only child. On her days off she took Daisy out on shopping expeditions, or to the zoo, or for what she called "Mum-Daisy Days." The changes lifted Alec's spirits and gave him new reason to hope that a turnaround was possible for his family.

Then Sandbrook happened.

The day Pippa Gillespie disappeared she was arguing with her boyfriend and a few of his friends about wanting to go with them to the local leisure centre. When the boys said no she left and walked around the corner to a friend's house. There, she called her mother and asked for a ride home but her mother didn't have her car. Pippa told her mother that she would find another ride with a friend and hung up the phone. Her body was found two days later in an abandoned farmhouse a few miles north of her friend's house.

Four days after Pippa's body was found, Isabel Field stopped by her older sister's house. No one was home but Issy delivered several items, leaving them on the porch. She was presumed headed to see a friend, whose parents lived a few blocks away from the town square. She called her father and left a message on his phone telling him she would catch a ride with a friend. A week later her body was found hidden under a pile of debris on the bank of a dry creek near a stable.

After Isabel's body was found Sandbrook's residents went into full-on panic mode. The local media began fomenting the panic and every day Alec picked up the papers to see more headlines criticizing the handling of the case. The public clamored for a quick resolution. Alec, as the lead detective, was pinpointed on many an occasion by the media, particularly by a zealous reporter named Karen White. She fancied herself an advocate for the victims and published many an interview with the bereaved parents.

Alec, meanwhile, was consumed by the case. He formed three teams of DS's and chose Melanie to lead one and to take on a new DS named Miles Rensler, who'd recently transferred from Penrith about six months prior to the murders. Alec practically lived at the station. He ate there and slept on the couch in his office. He would drag home to kiss his daughter on the head, thank all that was holy that she was safe, and obsessively make sure that the nanny he'd hired was doing her job before dragging himself back to the office. The pain written on the faces of the Gillespies and the Fields haunted his dreams at night and dogged his every step during the days. He had to make sure the case was solved.

The only thing Alec and his team could initially find linking the two girls together was that both had told their parents they would catch a ride with a friend. When Alec learned that the stable where Isabel's body was found was the same stable Pippa took lessons from, he began to look into any connection Isabel may have had with the stable. When her mother told him that she'd briefly dated a young stable hand there, Alec felt he had his prime suspect: Archie Joyce.

Archie was a troubled young man who'd been raised in the lap of Sandbrook luxury. His parents were well-known in the community and had done their best to cover up the fact that their son had been in and out of juvenile facilities from the time he was a young teen. One of Archie's community services sentences brought him to the stable where he'd met Isabel. They'd dated for a few months before Isabel had broken up with him.

Alec brought Archie in for questioning. He sat slumped in the chair across from Alec at the questioning table and clearly saw the mocking laughter in the young man's eyes. Archie knew all about dealing with the police. He folded his arms and looked at Alec and said only that he wanted a lawyer. His parents quickly arranged for legal representation and barring any concrete evidence linking Archie to the crimes, Alec had to let him go. Alec watched Archie walk out of the station with a heavy heart and lead in his gut. He knew he was letting the murderer walk free. When he had to explain to the Gillespies and the Fields why he'd had to let him go, he felt that same heavy-hearted feeling again.

Though Alec tried to get the manpower to dog every move Archie made, evidence was only circumstantial until three weeks later, when Libby Hammond was last seen by the friends she joined at a local restaurant. She told them she would walk home and began walking down the high street towards her house. CCTV from a nearby bank's ATM showed a grainy image of a white car with a distinctive red bumper sticker pulling up alongside her. The tape showed Libby pointing down the road before shrugging her shoulders and climbing into the car. Her body was found two weeks later buried in a shallow grave along a creek bed near a waste treatment plant.

It was the break that Alec had been waiting for. Archie Joyce drove a white car. The police combed the area for white cars while Alec sent Melanie and Miles out to Archie's trailer near the stables to do a search in Archie's car. The car was gone but the pair traced it to a car lot in the city where Archie had sold it just that day. They were able to procure a warrant to search the vehicle. Hidden deep between the back seat cushions they found a silver pendant, one belonging to Pippa Gillespie. It had Archie Joyce's fingerprints all over it.

The day that Melanie called him to report the fingerprint results was possibly one of the better days of his life. Alec was jubilant. He told Melanie to take the evidence to HQ and hung up the phone, dialing again quickly to share the news with the parents of the murdered girls. They wanted to take him out for drinks to celebrate and he accepted their invitation. Little did he realize that Melanie was planning to do some celebrating of her own in a hotel room, with Miles Rensler.

When he got Melanie's frantic call that her car had been broken into and the bag with the evidence stolen – and where she was, and with whom - his world came crashing down around him. He barely managed to show up at the hotel and send Melanie away before calling in the lost evidence to headquarters. Miles had left long before Alec arrived; if he hadn't, Alec wasn't sure he would have been able to resist beating the man to a pulp. He moved through the following days like he was struggling through a fog. In the aftermath, when he took the blame for the lost pendant, watched the trial collapse, shouldered the wrath of the parents and accepted that Melanie planned to leave him? It was only Daisy that kept him putting one foot in front of the other.

Alec had had plenty of time to think about all the reasons he'd chosen to accept the blame. One of more important reasons to him was to try to help preserve something of whatever relationship Daisy had managed to forge with her mother. He was afraid that if he'd revealed Melanie's affair, Daisy would blame him instead of Melanie because she couldn't let herself hate her mother even though part of her wanted to. She was always striving for Melanie's approval. But really, he worried that he would destroy the tenuous bonds that had begun to be forged between mother and daughter. He hadn't had an attentive mother and it devastated him to think he might inflict the same upon his own daughter.

If he looked further, he had to accept that he felt partially to blame for the entirety of the disaster that was his marriage. He knew his inability to confront the issues he knew existed was partially at fault. He had always avoided or ignored things instead of confronting them head on. He felt that if he had spent half as much effort and energy on his marriage as he had his job, Melanie would have never been in that motel room seeking something he hadn't been able to give her from someone else. There was a part of him that felt he deserved it.

The more Melanie acted out, the more Alec was driven to try to help her. He wanted so desperately to believe that the woman he saw wasn't who she really was. He wanted to believe she could change who she was – that underneath all that brittle armor was the woman he thought he'd seen when they worked together. The woman he loved. The woman he wanted to save. But no matter how hard he tried, she hadn't wanted saving. She wanted obedience. She wanted control.

It took him a while, but he learned that the woman he thought he saw didn't exist. He mourned the what-could-have-beens. He was still not quite ready to accept that his perception of her and her reality weren't the same.

Melanie made it clear immediately that she would divorce him. She didn't want her name attached at all to the worst cop in Britain. He did not fight her for the divorce nor for custody. She moved to Penrith and moved in with and later married Miles. Daisy knew the rest.

Alec had so many reasons for taking the blame for Sandbrook but there was one reason that didn't have anything to do with Melanie. As the parents of the murdered Sandbrook girls fell to pieces in front of him it was a harsh, painful reminder of the aftermath of his sister's death. He could barely stand up straight in the courtroom as the case unraveled. He was hit by surge after surge of the unresolved guilt and grief he'd buried since his sister had died. Accepting guilt - no matter that it wasn't his to shoulder - and standing up in public and saying he was responsible felt a little like cosmic payback. It hurt, but it felt good. It felt like penance.

Penance was something Alec Hardy was intimately familiar with. No matter where life took him it always seemed like he was chasing it. 

* * *

><p>Alec leaned back against the chair and watched Daisy as she sat in silence. His throat was sore from talking and he reached for his now cold cup of coffee. He took a swallow. He could see her turning everything he'd told her over and over in her head and trying to figure out what to ask about first.<p>

"How could she do that to you?"

Alec shrugged. "It's hard enough to explain it to myself, much less to you. I don't think about it, Daisy. I just keep on living day to day. It just happened. It just was, and then it wasn't."

"And you expect me to believe that it didn't matter to you? When you got so sick?"

"No." Alec put down his coffee cup. "I was sick because of a lot of things. The stress. The guilt. But it's fixed, darlin'. It's over."

Daisy shook her head. "It's not over. Not for me." She sighed. "You don't even know mum any more."

Alec gnawed at his bottom lip and winced again at the soreness. Then he nodded. "No, I don't. I'm listening, if you want to tell me."

Daisy nodded. She told him that for the most part, she lived her own life. She got herself off to school in the morning and got herself back home. Melanie and Miles were completely wrapped up in each other and didn't have much time for her unless she was doing something they thought was wrong. They certainly didn't want her to make them look bad. Miles was going places. He'd been lucky and had helped bring down a murderer and got name recognition and now he was pursuing election as Cumbria's Deputy Chief Constable. Alec flinched at the mention and Daisy sent him an apologetic smile.

"All this is to say, Da, that Mum and I got into a huge row when I found out it was her. She didn't admit to it even then, but she knew I knew." Daisy's eyes hardened. "If she'd just admit it. But she won't, and I'm tired of living where there are lies. I've lost enough of my life to them already." She stopped and then looked him straight in the eye. "That's why I want to live with you, Da. If you'll have me."


	6. Chapter 6

_Chapter Six – Detective Emmett Carver_

_Thursday, 16 January, 1:15 pm_

Carver slammed the door to his office and lowered himself slowly into his chair with a groan of pain. The morning had been a relentless flurry of activity. He'd stood sentry over the morgue truck as they took the girl's body in for processing and watched CSI seal off the surrounding area before the tide washed in and erased whatever evidence was still left at the scene. He was pretty sure he'd earned himself a case of windburn, he was chilled to the very bone, and his back was throbbing. It was going to be one of those days. Reluctantly he fumbled his desk drawer open and reached for the prescription bottle nestled in the top tray. He shook two small pills out onto his palm and swallowed them dry.

He rubbed his eyes with his palms and raked his frozen fingers through his auburn locks with a sigh of aggravation. His desk was a wreck. Case files with post-it notes begged for his attention but he decided they'd have to be parceled out in the wake of the murder. The last thing Carver wanted to do was mind the day-to-day petty crimes and complaints but he knew the business of policing would have to continue despite the new developments. He made up his mind to have Garrett round up some of the junior officers they could spare and distribute the cases between them.

He pushed the case files to the corner of his desk and slipped on his glasses as he pulled a pile of pink message notes towards him. One was timestamped from earlier in the morning and Carver worried his lip as he studied it. "Something about a wolf?" he read under his breath as he scratched at the stubble at the bottom of his chin. He didn't know a Rose T., but she wanted to see him urgently. Was this something to do with the murdered girl? Had she been bitten by a wild animal before or after her death, and if so, how did this woman know about it? They hadn't even received autopsy reports. He needed to ask the dispatcher for clarification.

Carver dragged the phone over and was just about to dial when a tap on his office window distracted him. Devyn Garrett was leaning against the glass with a manila folder under her arm, giving him a look that fell somewhere between apologetic and unsettled. He put down the phone, folded the note up and stuffed it in his pocket, and waved her in with a cursory crook of his finger. She closed the door softly behind her.

"Sorry to bother you, sir…"

"What?" he broke in.

Garrett's head snapped back in surprise. "Okay. Well, the autopsy's in progress. We should have preliminary results in the morning. We…."

"Oh, for chrissakes…..in the morning? Is _everything_ this slow around here?" Carver didn't wait for Garrett to reply. He ripped off his glasses with a growl of annoyance and rubbed his forehead. "Do we at least have a name yet?"

A muscle jumped in Garrett's jaw. His habit of interrupting her was enough to cause her to leap across his desk and strangle him. She entertained the idea for a pleasant moment before she reluctantly refocused and pulled the folder out of the crook of her arm, flicking it open and pausing a moment to read through the notes. It wasn't long before Carver began to tap his fingers impatiently on the desk. The sound made Garrett carefully contain a smile. She was going to make him wait, she thought smugly, and flipped another few pages into the report. The tapping continued, louder, and she fancied she could hear his teeth grinding together with impatience. See how that suits you, she thought, and waited a few more beats for good measure before giving him what he was waiting for. "Victim's name is Nina Blanchard. Sixteen. Her mother reported her as a runaway last summer." She turned a page. "Mother's name is Misti, father's is Randall. Divorced since Nina was ten. At the time her mother stated she thought Nina might've run off with a boyfriend. She and Nina were arguing a lot and…"

Garrett shot a glance at Carver as she read. He had leaned forward and planted his elbows on the desk, his lips pursed around the end of one of arms of his glasses. He was staring intently past her at a spot on the wall while he listened and for a moment it struck her just how incredibly handsome he was underneath the three-day scruff and the unruly flop of chestnut hair. The realization shocked her silent.

Carver's full bottom lip curled and he rounded on her, his chocolate eyes snapping in irritation. "And?"

Any momentary notion she had of his good looks dropped away with the tone of his voice, but like an imprint on her retina the impression of them persisted. "Sorry," she stammered, flustered by the lingering notion, then quickly flipped over another page in the file to give herself a little time to regain her equilibrium. "Yes. Anyway. Nina ran off…with the boyfriend. Maybe. Ah, I already said that."

Carver was staring at her, head cocked and both eyebrows raised, like she'd suddenly grown a second head.

"Look, this would go a lot faster if you'd stop doing….that." She pointed a finger at Carver's wide open-eyed expression. Instead of stopping him, her admonition only made his eyes open wider still. She huffed an exasperated breath through her nose. God, but he was difficult.

She cleared her throat, looked down, and concentrated on the file. "Her fingerprints were on file. The Detective Juvenile Unit had them. The case hadn't been revisited in a while but we've upgraded it in the light of…."

Carver made a rolling, hurry-it-up motion with his hand. "Stick to what's relevant, Garrett."

Garrett blinked in disbelief and the words started pouring out of her mouth before she could stop them. "Relevant?" she heard herself saying. "Was I the only one out on that beach this morning, _sir_?" she snarled. "Was I the only one who saw that poor girl, saw her holding her own ton….." she broke off and bit down purposefully on her lip. The pain helped her remember not to scream at him. Shaking with indignation, she met Carver's bland cocoa eyes across the desk. "You might not think any of this is relevant to Nina's _death_, sir, but this was her _life_, and in my book that makes it relevant."

After a short silence filled only by Garrett's agitated breaths, Carver looked pained. He inclined his head in silent acknowledgement.

Garrett opened her mouth to continue but shook her head slowly at herself instead. She wasn't going to give Carver the satisfaction. Struggling to keep a rein on her temper, she closed the file and looked up to see Carver's questioning face. She fought to keep her voice even. "You know what? There's not much more here that we can't share during the initial briefing. Sir," she added hastily. Through the glass walls of Carver's office she could see a half dozen officers milling around the squad room. "Speaking of, we're expected in the briefing room."

Carver stood and his chair legs squealed as they scraped against the floor. "That we are." He crossed his arms and she swore she saw the faintest trace of a smirk ghost across his lips. "Why don't you do it, Garrett?"

"What? The briefing? You mean….now? Right now?"

Carver watched the panic blossom on her face and arched a brow. A part of him wanted to take the offer back but he immediately thought better of it. Panic or no panic, she needed to handle this. He needed to know she was able to. "Absolutely."

Garrett turned around to look through the glass at the sea of waiting faces. They were all officers she knew but all of a sudden they felt like strangers. Her throat went dry and she swallowed hard. "But…."

"You're the one with the folder. You've read it. You just got finished telling me all that stuff is important," he pointed out. "So go forth and prove it."

Garrett turned back to look at Carver and scowled at him.

He just smiled placidly back at her.

* * *

><p>Carver took up a position against the wall nearest the door to his office and surveyed the station, folding his arms across his chest. Officers were passing by him with their coffees and shooting him confused, questioning glances because they expected him to be standing in his usual place in the center of the room near the large whiteboard instead of Garrett. Nina Blanchard's photo was displayed prominently at its center.<p>

The room slowly came to order as everyone began to take their seats. Every once in a while Carver noted a nervous look or two aimed his direction but when Garrett cleared her throat and said a little too loudly, "Okay, everyone settle down," the looks stopped and all eyes were on her. Her shoulders were hunched in on themselves and she was gripping the manila folder with white-knuckled hands like a lifeline. She was pale enough to make Carver wonder if she might pass out. He sucked on his front teeth and sighed. He really hoped he wouldn't have to rush in and rescue her.

Garrett held up the manila folder and cleared her throat once again. "I'm Devyn…Detective…Detective Devyn Garrett. You all know me. I'm…." she shot a glance over toward Carver, "one of the lead detectives working the case of Nina Blanchard, the girl whose body we found this morning on North Beach. The lead detective is Detective Carver, you all know him too." She waved the folder in her hand toward the corner where Carver stood and he nodded in return.

"Nina….. Nina is the victim's name," Garrett went on. Carver noticed her hands were trembling when she opened the folder and he wondered how far she would stick her nose into its depths to hide from the expectant faces in front of her. "Nina Blanchard, age sixteen. Mother Misti, father Randall, divorced since 2008. Randall was in arrears for child support but there wasn't any history of abuse or domestic violence prior to their divorce. Last June, Nina's mother reported her as a possible runaway. Some of you might remember the case."

A few heads were bobbing in recognition but Garrett cast her eyes around until they came to rest on Elijah Hull. Hull had been lead on the Blanchard disappearance. Hull sipped at his coffee and stared back at Garrett blandly. He looked like he was itching to say something but to Carver's surprise he apparently thought better of it and only asked blandly, "What did we get from witnesses?"

"I was just coming to that," Garrett replied. "No witnesses have come forward yet. We've got a few officers out canvassing neighborhoods around the beach to see if anyone saw anything later in the evening. Officer Hayes interviewed Howard Boreland, the man who found Nina's body. He's married and has just recently retired. Lives a couple miles up the coast and drives the khaki Land Rover parked off the beach. He's been crabbing at North Beach pretty regularly hunting Dungeness since the season opened back in November. He stated he was out on the part of the beach where Nina was found on Tuesday morning around seven and didn't see anything. This morning he said he saw a foot and thought it was a department store mannequin that had washed up on the beach and been buried in the sand. As soon as he realized what it was, he dialed 911."

Garrett turned toward the whiteboard and jotted down a few notes. Carver was heartened to see that with each passing second she seemed to grow more comfortable speaking in front of the room. "Nina had been missing since last summer," Garrett said over her shoulder. "Her mother reported her as a possible runaway when she hadn't returned home from a friend's over the weekend of June 15th of last year. Of course we checked with Nina's father but he hadn't heard from her either. At the time her mother thought she might've run off with a boyfriend but she didn't know who the boyfriend might be." She swiveled around to face the room. "One of Nina's friends said Nina had an older boyfriend named Jack but she'd never met him and couldn't say exactly how much older than Nina he was. A few times Nina had talked to her about running off with him. This Jack – if he even existed - was never located and over time, with no further leads, the case went cold.

"We don't know where Nina was in the seven months between her disappearance and her death," she concluded, her voice softening. "Finding that out is a priority if we're ever going to figure out who killed her."

The room was quiet as the officers absorbed Garrett's words. She shot a look toward Carver and he gave her the faintest nod of approval. She returned the nod as he unwound his arms and pushed himself off the wall, wincing at a sharp spasm in his lower back. He was just able to stop himself from grasping at it as he joined her in the center of the room.

"Okay," he said and cleared his throat, planting his hands on his hips. The pain coiling down his back was a reminder he couldn't escape, one that shortened his temper and roughened his voice into an impatient growl. "You've all heard Garrett's basic rundown. Now to prioritize." He began ticking off his words on his fingers. "Garrett and I will go to speak to the mother later this afternoon. But how did Nina Blanchard get from her mother's house to dead on a beach? She was obviously living somewhere in the months before her death. Find out where that was. We can assume she had clothes and shoes. Where are they? Did she have a phone? Find it. We're waiting on the medical examiner to tell us if she was sexually assaulted. She wasn't dumped there, she was placed, and carefully arranged to boot. That means someone who cared. Like a boyfriend. Is there really a boyfriend? He should be found and questioned." He paused. "Now's the time to undo the inept police work done during her disappearance."

There was a snort from the back of the room.

Carver swiveled his gaze. Elijah Hull had perched his large frame on a desktop and had one foot propped up on a nearby chair. He was holding a jumbo-sized mug of coffee in one meaty hand and a bearclaw in the other.

Carver's eyebrow shot up. "You have a problem, Hull?" The smile that accompanied his words was humorless.

Hull shrugged, a seemingly casual gesture that looked anything but. He took his time taking a bite of his pastry and chewed and swallowed it noisily before answering. "I might just be finding some humor in the fact that the cop who wrote the book on inept police work is calling _my_ investigative work into question."

Hull had hit a sore spot and he knew it. Carver bristled. Hull dropped the bearclaw onto his desk, instinctively reading the threat in the tensing of Carver's frame. The two men eyed each other, challenge in every line of their bodies. Carver's face hardened and his eyes were flint but Hull was a bull whose big body was built for combat and Carver, whipcord lean and with a bum back, was no match for him. Though it took every ounce of restraint Carver could muster not to march over and belt the smug, self-satisfied look off the older man's face, he knew he'd have to be content with the fantasy of it.

Garrett had read the situation and was moving between them before the thoughts were entirely finished forming in Carver's head. "Whoa, whoa, easy does it, fellows," she said in a tone that brooked no argument. "Dial it down. I've got no patience or room for your egos. We have a dead girl, in case either one of you has forgotten about the real reason we're here."

The other officers stirred in their seats and Hull and Carver both shifted uneasily. Neither man wanted to be the first to back off but finally Carver took the high road and pulled back, his irritation obvious. He stepped backwards until he stood next to Garrett near the whiteboard. He shot a look at her and to her surprise, it held a measure of respect rarely seen in the taciturn detective.

He cleared his throat and when he spoke, it was in his familiar terse manner. "And what the hell is this cameo rose?"

* * *

><p>As Garrett pulled through the front gate of the Sunny Valley Mobile Home Park out on the bluffs a few miles outside Gracepoint, Carver leaned his cheek against the window of the squad car and studied the semi-neat rows of run-down trailers lining the property. The afternoon was deceptively sunny but the window against his cheek was cold to the touch and he could hear the whine of a steady wind. Sun glinted off tin roofs as they rolled past the leaning, faded particle board fencing around the property's periphery. Most of the trailers were peeling in the sun and in various states of disrepair. The odd lawn chair or leaning garden gnome dotted a front yard.<p>

Carver listened to the crunch of gravel under the tires as Garrett drew the car over a white patch passing for a curb in front of a dilapidated mobile home sitting on the western edge of the park. He eyed the house. Red paint, chipped and peeling, clung onto its frame. Pieces of the corrugated tin covering the foundation beams had pulled away from the side of the house and rhythmically slapped against the structure in the wind.

Garrett put the car into park and dropped her hands on her lap. Her heavy sigh was full of sadness and dread. "How are we going to do this, sir?"

"As gently as possible."

The two of them trudged silently through the overgrown grass in the front yard to Misti Blanchard's front door. When Misti met them and took a look at their badges, her eyes went a touch too big for her face and her sudden wan coloring made Carver's stomach drop. She nodded her head and motioned them inside.

The rusty screen door made a loud pop as it snapped closed behind him amid a waft of stale, overly heated air that reeked of cigarette smoke and pot roast. His eyes roamed around the cramped living room. It was meager, but clean and uncluttered. A couch with sunken springs, two mismatched easy chairs, and a stained coffee table were in the center of the room. In the kitchen Carver could see the top of a slow cooker on the counter and a framed picture of a smiling, dark-haired young girl on the bar. A TV set with an oscillating red and green stripe running on the horizontal blared in the corner. Garrett perched on the edge of one of the chairs but Carver stayed on his feet, stuffing his hands deep in the pockets of his dark trench coat.

Misti turned down the volume and sat on the couch. She was a painfully thin woman who in her younger years had probably been startlingly pretty. Traces of beauty still clung to her. Dark brown hair, limp and hanging past her shoulders, framed a narrow face with watery cerulean eyes under thinning, dusky lashes. Her skin was pale and sallow and hung loose over her slender bones. Carver thought she looked like a porcelain doll – chipped, fragile….breakable. She reached for the pack of cigarettes on the table with shaking hands. As she lit one and brought it up to her mouth Carver could see her bright red manicure, a detail he couldn't note without being transported back to the beach, and to the red polish on her daughter's nails as it mingled with the clinging sand. A lump started to form in the back of his throat and he swallowed and turned his head to stare out unseeingly through the window blinds, willing his suddenly watering eyes to stay dry. Now was not the time.

Garrett cleared her throat. The sound brought him back into the room with a jolt and he realized no one had yet uttered a single word. Both women were looking at him expectantly. Misti took a drag of her cigarette and puffed the smoke out through nicotine-stained teeth. The hope flaring in her eyes pulled a chord of dread taut in his stomach.

"What is this about? Is this about my Nina? Have you found her?"

The silence that followed Misti's question was thick. Garrett swallowed and her hands came up to shape the air in front of her into a helpless, palms-up gesture. Carver could tell she didn't know how to start, so he sank down on the open chair across from Misti and leaned forward, folding his hands together between his knees. "I'm Detective Carver and this is Detective Garrett," he said carefully. "We're from the Gracepoint Police Department. We'd like to talk to you about your daughter."

Misti nodded. Carver saw the moment she understood, because the hope in her eyes vanished. The cigarette she held dipped, its smoking tip forgotten between her fingers, as she turned her head and stared out the window blinds Carver had looked through himself moments before. The smoke from her cigarette curled into the air, hanging like a fog in the heavy silence of the room.

Finally Misti spoke. "She wasn't perfect, but she was mine." Tears coursed soundlessly down her cheeks. "She was the only one I could ever have. I had such a hard time bringing her into the world. I wasn't ever able to have another. You raise them, and you try, and sometimes you mess up but at least you try, and you hope they do things you never got to do. You hope they can find some sort of happiness, because...because this world…." her lips distorted. "It can sure beat you down."

The grief camouflaged in the monotone rasp of her words scraped like a serrated blade along Carver's backbone, ripping open wounds deep within him that had barely begun to scab over. He felt the pain of it like a physical blow. His world began to narrow. Pinching the bridge of his nose with a trembling hand, he fought for a way to silence the low roar beginning in his head as Misti's words went on in the background.

"When I didn't hear from her I thought…." her voice broke, and she shook her head. "Because she didn't call. She would've called. But I hoped I was wrong," she whispered. She dragged on her cigarette with shaking hands. "I've never wanted to be wrong so much in my whole life."

Garrett rose to sit beside Misti on the couch. Unshed tears were welling in her eyes and her voice was clogged with sorrow. "I am so sorry," she murmured as Misti collapsed into her arms. The detective held the grieving woman as she sobbed. For once, Carver didn't send Garrett a look castigating her for her immediate empathy. While Garrett explained as gently and delicately as possible where they'd found Nina and that her death was considered suspicious, he was busy digging his fingernails into the palms of his hands and swallowing back his own jumbled mix of sadness and helpless rage. He'd never admit it to Garrett, but he was grateful. He needed the time to pull himself together.

When he felt he had a handle on himself he schooled his expression into professional blankness and inched forward on the chair. He exchanged a small nod with Garrett, who eased Misti back into a sitting position and said to her softly, "I'm sorry, I know this is hard, but Detective Carver needs to ask you a few questions. Do you think you can do that?"

Misti nodded, red-eyed, and swiped at her tears.

"Mrs. Blanchard," he began, trying for a soothing, steady tone, "Can you think of anyone who would want to hurt your daughter?"

"No. Everyone loved Nina."

Carver was surprised at how swiftly the familiar roiling sense of frustration and urgency that fueled him during long investigations was overtaking the sadness of Nina's loss and he resisted the urge to point out that someone out there certainly hadn't. He nodded instead. "When Nina disappeared, you said her friends mentioned a boyfriend named Jack. Is there anything you've learned since then that might help us find out whether she really did have a boyfriend?"

"I told your detectives I thought Nina might've had a boyfriend because she took to sneaking out at night after I went to work." Misti raked her fingers through her hair, pulling at the ends fretfully. "I work the late night shift as a waitress out at the Grill on the highway. It made it difficult for me to…..to keep her on the right….right path. She and I were having arguments because she was sneaking out at night. She was fifteen, and I didn't want her to…" she broke off and barely got the words out between her gasps. "I just wanted to make sure she was safe."

Carver paused a moment to let her collect herself. Then he asked his last question. "Did your daughter ever own a violet cameo necklace? With a black rose?"

Misti frowned. "She didn't own one when she lived here, Detective." She looked down. "But there's a lot I'll never get to know about my Nina."

* * *

><p>Carver pulled into his garage and waited until the overhead door closed and plunged him into darkness before he killed the engine and slumped against the wheel. He pulled the keys out of the ignition and the keyring jangled as it slammed against his thigh. His eyes felt like sandpaper and his head was buzzing. It had been a long day, and caffeine and adrenaline had only carried him so far. The bone-weary exhaustion that had been his constant companion since he'd left San Francisco had burrowed down so deep he wasn't sure he'd be able to get out of the car and make it into the house.<p>

His fists clenched at his sides and though he pressed his forehead as hard as he could into the cool leather steering wheel cover, it didn't stop the tears that leached out from between his lids or the scenes from the past from playing back in a loop. Days like this, the days her death haunted him, were the worst. For most of the day he'd managed to run just fast enough to keep out in front of them but here in the cold garage, they finally caught up.

He was back there again with Kirsten, on a sandy stretch of dockyard beach under the piers. They shouldn't have followed Emilio Artuso across the Bay Bridge into Oakland, it was out of their jurisdiction and Carver had known it – which was why he'd never called for backup - but the sonofabitch had thrown seven-year-old Erin Upchurch in the back of his van and they were hot on his tail. In the heat of the moment, with two other little girls already dead back in San Francisco, it had seemed like the right thing to do. And if he was honest? He'd wanted to be a hero. Heroes didn't call for backup.

They'd pulled the car up, headlights out, and slunk down the rocky beach as silently as they could. The place was treacherous even on the sunniest of days but that night the water twinkled in the half-light of the moon and spun reflections off the tar-soaked beams under the pier. Carver could just see the shadowy outline of Artuso's van underneath the densest part of the dock with one of its back panels swung wide open. Both of them drew their weapons. As they approached the van he checked inside. It was empty. He backed off, then jerked his head to Kirsten to make a wide circle right while he moved left. She nodded and moved out.

Sending Kirsten to the right had been his call. The right panel of the van had been left open and he figured there was a good chance Artuso had headed left instead of going around it. It was a decision he'd played back over and over in his head. If he'd sent her left, would that have made any difference?

Halfway around the van he saw Kirsten, who'd moved an alarming way down towards the beach line. She motioned to him and then pointed along the shoreline under the pier, indicating she thought she'd spotted something ahead of her. He couldn't see a thing - it was hard to tell if it was all just a trick of the waning light - but he nodded and moved towards her anyway. He couldn't risk using the flashlight in his belt to be sure.

As he went down under the docks and between the pier beams he remembered the slip of the sand under his shoes throwing him off balance just as he heard a muffled cry somewhere to his left. He twisted toward the sound and brought his weapon to bear, a move that likely saved his life. Artuso had been aiming for his head. The full impact of the sudden blow to his mid-spine spun his gun out of his hand and he heard the snap as his vertebrae shattered. With a torturing slowness the ground began to tilt toward him. His heart gave a beat like the blow of a sledgehammer and everything seemed to splinter. His brain had time to form only one word: Kirsten. The flying shards of pain shredded the rest of his thoughts. After that, his heart beat again, and he was conscious of nothing except one long, raw stretch of purest agony.

Carver didn't know how long he laid there splayed face down on the sand before he finally came to himself. His vision was swimming and the air he sucked in through his laboring lungs felt thick and heavy, but despite it all a marvelous calm swept over him. Was this what dying felt like? If so, he was only able to muster a mild surprise. He watched in a semi-stupor as Artuso, a long-bladed knife stuffed in his belt, brandished the crowbar again and moved toward him to finish the job. Carver remembered being ready for the blow, had even accepted its inevitability, but it never came. Something wriggled in the heavy-set Mexican's grip, distracting him, and Carver realized it was Erin just before the crowbar dropped with a muffled thud a few inches away from his face and sprayed sand into his eyes. The sound of Artuso's low cursing was woolly in Carver's ears as Artuso smacked the girl in his arms across her face until she dangled bonelessly in his arms. The big man struck out with her across the sand.

The calm that had claimed Carver in the minutes before Artuso's approach with the crowbar dissolved into a wave of fury. He raised his head and looked down the moonlit beach. Artuso's outline was a dark shape moving against the backdrop of sparkling water. Further down the beach he saw another, smaller dark shape. Oh, God. _Kirsten_.

He recalled how the panic had hit him then, with both barrels. He struggled to prop himself up on his elbows, feebly trying to get up, but he found his legs wouldn't obey him when he attempted to push a knee under him for leverage. He tried to yell for her, to warn her, but the pain that shot like liquid fire up his back was so brutal it took the breath out of him in a woosh. He barely squeezed her name out in a hoarse croak.

Red swam around Carver's peripheral vision, clouding his sight. For a time he dangled precariously against the precipice of unconsciousness. He dipped his head back into the sand and breathed past the stars sparking behind his eyes and the nausea pooling in his guts.

His head shot up again when he heard Kirsten yell. "Put her down!"

_Jesus_.

Carver pressed his forehead further into the steering wheel. _Not again_, he chanted to himself. He didn't want to hear it again. He heard it too much, when he was awake, and in his dreams, and no matter what he did, how angry he got or how mean he got or much he tried to push it away, the helplessness and the pain and the guilt clawed at him. It wouldn't let him go. "Kirsten," he whispered brokenly against the wheel. "Kirsten." But he couldn't stop it. He could never stop it. It kept on playing.

They were moving. It was slow motion, and there was nothing Carver could do but watch. He could see Kirsten chasing Artuso down the beachline, pointing her gun, yelling at him to drop the girl. Artuso ignored her, stepping back in the sand and lifting Erin in his arms to use her as a shield. There was little light, just moon and shadows, and it was a tricky shot. Kirsten's aim was off.

Carver remembered the shots. When they rang out they were so close they sounded like firecrackers against the soft roaring of the tide. One went wide, and the other caught Erin in the side of her head. Carver heard the squelch of the blow, the spray of the little girl's blood, and saw Kirsten's mouth open wide in a soundless scream of anguish as she fully realized what she'd done.

Artuso dropped the girl's body as Kirsten wavered on her feet and sank bonelessly to her knees, clipped like an unstrung doll. All the fight drained out of her. Moonlight glinted off the long blade as Artuso drew it out of his belt and with a speed belying his size, went after his wife.

Carver tried again to yell at her. His voice was a mere bark, but she must've heard him at last. She looked up and saw him lying in the sand. It took a moment for it to register, but when it did she stumbled to her feet. "Emmett!" she screamed his name.

Then Artuso was on her.

There was a flash of the knife and the thud of Kirsten's body as it hit the ground. Carver moaned in a paroxysm of grief so vast it threatened to consume him whole. He squeezed his eyes shut and prayed for Artuso to come over and finish the job he'd started, to put an end to all of this. Instead, Artuso picked himself up, wiped the blade on his shirt, and ran.

Kirsten was crying his name, over and over, dying by degrees, and each time her voice sounded weaker and farther away. Each syllable was a punch to his gut. While his guilt-ridden memory told him he'd laid there and let his wife die, in reality he'd found the strength somewhere to push himself on his stomach along the sand, passing out from the pain only to come to and keep pushing on. But by the time he managed to drag himself to her side there was only blood and sand and her open eyes staring at the moon. Her cries had ceased.

But he could hear the echoes of them still.

When the door to the garage from the house opened and flooded the garage with light, Carver jerked up, wiping at his eyes with the back of his hand. He squinted at the figure standing in relief in the doorway.

"What are you doing here out in the car? I've been trying to get hold of you all day, Emmett."

"Mom," he whispered, knowing she couldn't hear him through the rolled-up car window. "Please….don't call me Emmett."


	7. Chapter 7

_Chapter Seven – DI Peter Carlisle/DI Alec Hardy_

_Saturday, 22 February, 2:36 am_

Peter Carlisle gingerly eased his body onto a floral-upholstered bench in the corner of the policeman's lounge. He flopped back with a sigh and propped a cushion under his head, then tugged at the corners of his long trench coat and wrapped his wiry arms around his torso, snuggling into the coat for warmth. The lounge was quiet this time of the morning and Carlisle hoped he might be able to catch a few winks before he had to go back out.

An hour later something shook him out of a dreamless sleep so sound he had to swim to its surface. It took him a few tries to blink awake and register the fact his phone alarm was going off. The high-pitched beep bounced off the walls of the darkened lounge. He sat up and tried to fumble for his phone but spent an odd, confused few minutes trying to untangle himself from his coat. Finally he worked a hand free of a sleeve and switched the yelping thing to silent. He tossed the coat aside and sat a moment longer getting his bearings, scrubbing a hand down his face to help clear the last of the cotton wool from his head. Whoa, but he was tired.

He hauled himself up off the bench to a standing position. His limbs felt heavy and he stumbled a bit when he put his weight on his left leg. It was numb from the knee down. Great, he groused, that was going to sting like a sonofabitch when it woke up. He contemplated coffee. Anything to clear the rest of the fog. He crossed to the coffeemaker but pulled up at the last second and grabbed an Irn Bru from the refrigerator instead. He sipped it and threw back his head with a blissful murmur, riding on the rush of the sugar and caffeine as it thrummed like a live thing through his bloodstream and urged every nerve and fiber to open up their hungry mouths and drink in deep. Soon he was in that drifty no-man's land where exhaustion was so total it felt like alertness.

For the past couple weeks he'd been living on four hour snatches of sleep and eating nothing but Nando's, crisps, and coffee in the seat of a police car. With Blythe. He supposed this was God's way of gifting him his own special layer of hell on earth. If he believed in God, anyway. He wasn't sure he did. Believing in a God that would put him through all this just sounded like masochism. He'd sinned more than his fair share of sins, to be sure, but masochism hadn't ever been one of them.

Peter finished off the Irn Bru and rolled his shoulders, pushing the pads of his fingers into the tense spots at the base of his neck. A case that had started as a run-of-the-mill ring of soft drug peddlers was turning out to be something else entirely. He wasn't sure what that something was yet, but he had to admit it was beginning to intrigue him. He'd started in narcotics so he'd been around the block a time or two and seen plenty of the shifty, twitchy-type dealers and their haphazard attempts at networking. Mostly they were idiots or users themselves and got caught because of their own stupidity. They dealt in tenners passed in quick exchanges, in car parks or in clubs and rundown flats. They certainly didn't organize, and they definitely didn't manufacture. But it was starting to look like they might've happened upon someone who was.

A tapping interrupted his thoughts. Bryan Blythe was leaning against the door frame with a gaze like undisturbed pond water. He didn't look as if the late nights had worn him down at all. Peter hated him just a little bit.

"Hey," Blythe greeted. "There's a club on the outskirts of town called Treasures we might need to check out. Hope you caught enough sleep."

Peter rolled his eyes and buttoned up his coat.

11:13 am

Daisy shivered as she leaned on the kitchen counter and waited for the kettle light to go off. The Hardy living room was icy. She hadn't learned how to properly light the radiators – according to Alec they were dodgy and he didn't want her to mess with them - so she made do until he rose by piling the quilts on while she curled up on the settee and watched the telly or read a book. She was hungry but she wasn't sure rattling around in the kitchen was the best idea.

Even though it was just after eleven, her dad was still asleep. In the few weeks she'd lived with him she'd noticed he was sleeping in late quite often. She didn't know if it was because he was still recovering from his heart surgery or if it was a symptom of something larger, but the rapidly lowering level of scotch in the bottle on the bar hadn't escaped her notice. Neither did the sometimes-smell of stale alcohol clinging to him. Her mum had always said her dad's singleminded dedication to work over family was one of the primary reasons she'd left, but to Daisy's recollection she'd never made any mention of drinking. He wasn't working, that was for sure, and maybe he was depressed about it. Whatever it was that was eating at him, it worried her. She sighed. She wished she could figure out how to approach the topic without it blowing up in her face.

The clock over the fireplace ticked rhythmically as the kettle finally clicked off. Daisy stirred sugar and milk into her tea and as she licked off the leftover sugar on the warm spoon she looked around the room. The carpet was adequate – a dark brown short pile flattened out over the years but surprisingly odor-free – and the wallpaper was a tight tan and brown geometric floral popular thirty years ago. It lent the room a claustrophobic feel and gave her a headache if she stared at it too much. There wasn't much in the way of furniture but what there was of it was dark and heavy, probably also straight out of the same decade. Her dad's favorite recliner was pushed over near the fireplace with a multicolored quilt draped over the seat, and the settee was across from it and angled nearest the telly. The telly itself was at least ten years old.

Tea in hand, she hurried to the settee and not for the first time told herself to get her dad to show her how to crank up the old radiators. It would be a good idea to go open the door to her bedroom, too - if it was cold out here in the main room, it was positively glacial back there. She darted over, cracked the door, and scurried back under the quilts.

It'd only been a few weeks but adjusting to life in Kendal was turning out to be more difficult than she thought it would be. She'd been admitted to Queen Katherine's, the local academy. Her dad told her it would take a bit to meet new people and though she knew he was right, it was tough to go to school alone and come home from school alone and feel such isolation throughout the school day. She missed the group of friends she'd left behind at her old school. She told herself to keep her head high and work hard to meet people but the cliques at Queen K's were well-established and despite her best efforts she'd make little headway so far.

Trying to be liked and accepted was an undertaking she'd never had to worry about before. Being Miles and Melanie Rensler's daughter had definitely had its benefits in Penrith. She'd grown up there. Everyone knew her. Friendships were easy. She was popular and a good student and friends gravitated towards her. Here in Kendal she was just one of the crowd, and she had to admit it was pretty disconcerting. For the first time in her life she felt like a real outsider. She didn't like the feeling at all. She wanted to take it all in stride but she couldn't help feeling pretty frustrated about it.

Daisy picked at the quilt. She hated admitting she felt that way. Still, she told herself, feeling homesick and frustrated didn't mean she was regretting her choice to move away from her mum. Much. There were days when she sat in the flat and wondered if she'd made the right decision, but there were plenty more when she knew she had. Even though she was living in a cheap, cold little flat and dealing with spoiled, selfish schoolmates, it was worth it. Spending time with her dad and getting to know him was amazing. Now that she knew the truth she could hope to begin letting go of the anger and resentment she'd harbored against him for years and years. Being with him on a daily basis, living with him and seeing who he was as a person? It made letting go of all that even easier.

Daisy thought back to the many times her mum had subtly encouraged all those feelings of rejection and the anger started bubbling up in her again. It left a bitter taste in her mouth. Her dad didn't seem at all like the type of man her mum had made him out to be, and if she'd lied about him, and lied about her role in the Sandbrook murders, and lied about cheating, what _else _had she lied about? It made her question everything her mum had ever told her.

After she'd informed her mum she was moving in with her dad they'd had a huge row, in the midst of which her mum first tried tears and woe and then, when Daisy refused to be swayed, pitched an anger-filled fit and hurled accusations about disloyalty and ungratefulness. She accused Alec of taking Daisy away from her, threatened to disown Daisy and cut her off if she chose her dad over her, and then told Daisy she hadn't wanted her around anyway and they'd be better off without her once Miles made Deputy Chief Constable. When Daisy still wouldn't budge Melanie made good on her threats. She promptly canceled Daisy's mobile service and gave her a week to move out.

Just the thought of the row and of all her mum's vitriol made her guts churn. Tears pricked her lids but she swallowed them back, hard. She absolutely refused to cry about it. As far back as she could remember her mum had said her dad didn't care about her, and yet it had been Alec that had given her a real choice – he hadn't threatened to take away his love and concern if she chose to stay in Penrith. Not like her mum had. It hurt so deep to realize her mum had been the one manipulating her, and had probably been doing so with just about everything in her life for years, that hardening her heart was the only thing she could think of to do against it.

Daisy glanced at the mobile phone, which was sitting next to her on the side table. She wasn't sure why she kept it. It was useless now except in an emergency. Maybe it was a reminder. She was angry about the phone, sure, but she was mostly relieved. It couldn't be used as a weapon of torture, a way her mum could reach back in and sink her claws in. She was glad it was canceled. She didn't want _anything_ connecting her to her mum. She was tired of being pushed and pulled around.

Daisy reached for her tea and grimaced. It was tepid. She sipped at it anyway and picked up the book in her lap. She didn't want to think about her mum any more.

Some time later a faint but insistent buzzing cut through Daisy's deep concentration on the book in her hands. It took her a second to realize that it was coming from behind Alec's closed door. When the buzzing finally stopped she strained her ears in vain listening for any sign of Alec's gravelly tones. She didn't hear any, so finally she shrugged and gave up.

She'd just went back to her book when the rotary phone sitting on the side table next to her rang. Daisy jumped. When she'd moved in with her dad she noticed he still had a rotary telephone connected to the wall with wires. When Alec was around she pretended to be properly condescending and turn her nose up towards the bulky, retro piece of technology but in reality she thought it was pretty cool. She liked holding the switchhook buttons on the top down and dialing just to hear the tick-tick-tick of the dial as it rotated to zero. Still, it took her a couple of days to stop flinching at the sound of its piercing ring.

She reached over and plucked the handset off the cradle. "Hallo?"

"Oh, hallo….hallo there. Um…Daisy? Did I call your mobile instead?" The voice at the other end of the line sounded a bit tinny, and very confused. "I thought this was…..bloody hell. Have I dialed the wrong number?"

"That depends. What number were you trying?"

"Your dad's." A pause. "This is Ellie, by the way. Ellie Mil….Jeffries."

The catch in Ellie's voice on the last word was clear. Daisy winced; she could tell Ellie hadn't yet grown used to using her maiden name. "Oh, hallo, Ellie!" she said as brightly as she could. "No, you got the right number. I'm living with dad now. Didn't he tell you I was?"

"Ah, of course he did! Silly of me to forget. I dialed his mobile but he didn't answer so I thought I'd try him at home. Is he around?"

Daisy wanted to say _he's in bed sleeping it off_, but as soon as the thought came she chased it away. "No," she said instead, rather too quickly, her brain racing as she cast about for an excuse. "He's….he's gone round to the market. Must've left his phone here, I thought I heard it ringing just a bit ago." She gripped the receiver to her ear, her teeth set against her bottom lip, hoping Ellie wouldn't pry. "Can I tell him something for you?"

Ellie didn't reply immediately and Daisy breathed out a sigh of relief when she said, "I see. Well. Sure. Could you tell him Beth went into labor yesterday - was a bit early - but everything came out fine, no pun intended, let's not conjure up those sorts of visions! – but she had her a boy, they've named him Alec. Alec Daniel Latimer. I thought he should know."

"Sure I will," Daisy said, grinning from ear to ear. "Dad will love that!"

"Of course he will," Ellie agreed, indulgent amusement warming the edges of her already kindly voice. "He'll put on a sour face and grouse about Alec being a horrible name and why would anyone saddle a poor child with it. But he'll be walking about for weeks on end with his chest all puffed out."

Daisy laughed, a delighted sound she toned down in a hurry when she glanced over at Alec's still-closed door. Ellie laughed along with her and the two shared a moment's amusement. "Okay," Ellie finally said, picking up the thread of the conversation with a trace of humor still lingering in her tone, "tell your dad not to worry about a gift. I've taken care of it. Put his name on it and everything. I know with his severance running out, and it not being what it should've been and all," she made an affronted snort, "your dad's in straits. But do tell him he might think about ringing the Latimers. They did just name their son after him."

The door to Alec's bedroom creaked open and Alec stepped out, barefoot, blinking like a disoriented mole. He scratched at the pale wedge of abdomen exposed between the waistband of his pajamas and a too-short undershirt and shivered in the chill air. His wildly unkempt hair looked as if he'd stood in the center of an electrical storm. Slashing a sleepy grin over at Daisy, he ran a hand through it and it bristled up in all directions before falling into a semblance of its normal structure. "Mornin'," he mumbled. "Had breakfast yet?"

"No," she grinned back. "Thought I'd wake you if I started clanging about."

"Might've done." Alec nodded absently and yawned. "Jesus, it's cold in here."

"You noticed?" she couldn't help but tease him. "You told me not to mess with the radiators."

Alec crunched up his nose and shuffled around lighting the radiators until they chugged to life. As he bent to the last one he said, "Aye, I did. Remind me to teach you how, girl. You're bloody useless."

"Says the man who sleeps 'til noon."

"Cheek!"

Daisy laughed, a delighted sound that warmed Alec to the soles of his feet. The radiator chose that exact moment to rattle alarmingly. Alec grimaced and sat back on his heels to listen. Heat was pumping out in waves and he rubbed his palms together and soaked it up before reaching in to adjust the balance. It was just leveling out when he heard Daisy clear her throat.

"Da….Ellie called."

"She did?" Alec furrowed his brow. "Is something the matter?"

"No, nothing's the matter. It's lovely news. Beth Latimer had her baby. She had a boy. They named him Alec Daniel."

Alec rarely blushed but the surge of pride swelling up through his chest with the thought Beth would name her child after him flushed his face with pleasure. He could feel his ears burning and the feeling disarmed him. "Oh, why'd they go and do that for?" he boomed rather too loudly and waved a hand around in the air. His brow puckered with distaste. "No one wants a name like Alec."

Daisy laughed. Ellie had been spot on.

"Da," she said, cutting through his internal pride, "Ellie also said you needed to remember to call the Latimers, because they did just name their son after you." She hesitated. "Ellie said she already bought a gift and put your name on it."

"She did, did she?" Alec frowned, and then slowly the frown turned into a scowl. "You can just tell her to stop that right now," he huffed. "I can buy my own gift."

"I'm not getting in the middle of this." Daisy held up her hands. "You call Ellie and have a go at her instead of me. I'm too hungry to start a row. How about we think about food instead?"

"You're on."

As Alec passed her into the kitchen the distinctive aroma of stale alcohol clinging to him wafted towards her. Daisy wrinkled up her nose and her suspicions dive-bombed into a ball of apprehension settling at the bottom of her stomach like a lead weight. Her dad wasn't the layabout type. Some men could manage it and even revel in it, but not Alec. He needed to work. In the evenings he paced the flat like a caged animal and more often than not ended up in front of the bar, pouring himself a scotch, in front of the telly.

Something would have to be done, she thought to herself. She had to bring it up. She squared her shoulders. "Ellie said something else, Da."

"Oh?" Alec swung around to face her, gripping a slab of bacon in his hand. "And what was that?"

"She said something about you being in straits? About your severance not lasting too much longer?"

The thunderous expression that swept across Alec's face was enough for Daisy to quail a little. "Ellie needs to keep her nosy little nose out of my business," he growled under his breath as he slammed bacon into a skillet. "She should look to her own garden before crawling into mine."

"She was just being thoughtful! She's concerned about you, and rightly so," Daisy countered hotly, her own concern making her pay little heed to the words pouring out of her mouth. "And you need a job anyway. You're getting way too grouchy, and drinking too much. You sleep late and smell of it in the morning."

Alec shoved the refrigerator door shut. "Daisy…."

"You're gonna tell me you don't reek of it? You do."

When Alec rounded the corner, his hands were curled into fists and his face was blotchy with the effort of holding himself in check. "You want to know the truth?" he managed to say. "I've tried to get a job. They tell me I'm too sick to work, or they've managed to keep me blocked from getting another job on the force. I've got my severance, but it'll run out in a few more months." He sucked in a breath. "You happy now?"

Daisy stared at him, at the barely contained shaking in his shoulders, in the defeated posture, in the embarrassed way he darted his eyes past hers, and she got up and ran to him. She put her arms around him and as he stood stiffly in her embrace she murmured into his chest, "I'm not happy, Da. How can I be when you're not? I'm sorry for being mean. I just….care. I worry."

Finally, Alec's arms came up around her. "Hun. Never you mind. I'll figure it out. Okay?"

She nodded against his chest. "Yes. _We'll_ figure it out, indeed."

Alec sighed and kissed the top of her head.

11:41 am

Blythe's rousing rendition of a catchy rock tune on the radio pulled Peter out of a restless sleep in the backseat of their unmarked squad car. His shoulder made a loud crack as he rolled over on his side and stretched out his long legs along the floorboards. Yawning, he sat up and checked his watch. Almost midday. Carlisle rolled his eyes and let loose an inward groan.

The cab of the car was stuffy and sour with the mingled odors of coffee and sweat. He used the sleeve of his coat to swipe at the condensation fogging up the window and stared out at the darkened club. In the hazy daylight Treasures stood derelict. The club, once painted a vivid white, was now peeling garishly. The car park behind it was gravel. Overcast skies limned the unlit neon sign across the street with a pearly sheen and made him squint.

He and Blythe had picked up this case off the sheaf of files on his desk. Well, Blythe had. The two worked together but had two days a week where they branched off solo to clear the case files in a more timely manner. Peter had been busy working a petty burglary case while Blythe decided to go hit up Treasures on his solo days.

Treasures was one of those clubs known for picking up easy tenners in the back car parks after hours. Blythe figured it would be easy to find the dealers who parceled out the territory and had gone a few weeks under at the club, going in and getting to know some of the girls. He'd found a few petty dealers arguing over the car park territory but when he finally managed to score a place at the back tables, he learned there was much more to the club than a simple front for easy exhanges.

One girl in particular named Dahlia, who worked the front on slow days and the back tables on busy ones, told Blythe she'd seen more going down than a few easy deals. Peter suspected that wasn't the only thing she was busy going down on. Blythe had that look about him, the one that said he was getting blown out. Peter had seen it before. Peter had _done_ it before. Blythe looked like he was sure he had in the thick of it with Natalie. It was a precarious place to be.

Blythe had finally asked for his help and as much as he wasn't sure of the girl, the case did seem like it had some teeth. He'd sent one of his own snitches to double check and it seemed there was some credence to the idea that a manufacturer was at play. He'd agreed to stake out the club all night but except for the odd shoving match outside in the car park, nothing had seemed out of the ordinary.

Peter considered the evening a complete waste of time – time much better spent in the comforts of his own bed. He reached for his styrofoam coffee cup and peeled off the plastic lid. The cream he'd put in his coffee had partially congealed and floated in thin white rivulets in the tepid liquid. He sighed. Such was the life of a copper. He sipped it anyway.

Peter shot a glance into the front seat. "It's noon, Blythe," he crabbed at the back of Blythe's head. "I've been in these clothes so long I'm afraid they'll get up and walk off without me. Club's closed. Nothing's happened. Nothing's gonna happen. If your fancy girl Dahlia is even in there, she's forgotten you. For the love of God, let's get out of this bloody car."

"Fine." From Blythe's tone Peter could tell it wasn't.

Blythe started the car and pulled out towards the station. He circled the back side of the club and had just passed the staff exit when he laid on the brake with a muffled curse. The stop was so sudden that the tires squealed and the car did a sideways slide. Peter's bark of surprise as his coffee flew out of his hand and splashed onto the rear window turned into a bleat of pain as he skidded across the naugahyde and hit the floorboards.

"Bloody hell, Blythe!" Peter yelped. "What the…"

Blythe was too busy steering the car out of the slide to snarl anything more than "Pipe down!" into the backseat. Peter scrabbled for purchase on the slick vinyl and yanked himself back up into a sitting position. He peered out of the coffee-stained window just in time to see the club door swing shut with a bang. A woman in a thin sky blue coat with high platform heels was running away from the club and toward the car, her mid-calf dress clinging to her curves in all the right places. Even from a distance Peter could see her short-cropped, curly ginger hair shining like a nimbus in the midday haze.

"There she is. Finally!" Blythe crowed. He swerved to a stop, slammed the car into park, and reached across the seat to unlock the passenger door. He waved the woman over and she hurtled herself into the seat. The percussion when she yanked the door shut nearly burst Peter's eardrums.

Peter popped up from the backseat to let out a string of curses just as Blythe hit the gas. He slid along the naugahyde again but managed to catch himself on the seat rest and pull himself around. "Jesus bloody Christ, Blythe," he panted, gripping the back of the rest, "what don't you understand about the 'remaining hidden' part of reconnai…."

The woman turned to face him fully and her doe-eyes rounded in shock.

Peter trailed off, his eyes blowing just as wide. His throat constricted painfully. "Fuck," he rasped. "Danielle?"

* * *

><p><em><span>Tuesday, 25 February, 4:17 pm<span>_

The "Part-Time Vacancy" sign posted on the shop door of the Book On the Bright Side drew Daisy into the small shop on Highgate. Her fingertips brushed against the sign like a good luck talisman as she swung the door open.

The low hiss of a cappuccino maker joined the bell as it pealed her arrival. Slanting rays of afternoon sunshine lanced through the open door and the air swirled with dust dots. Rows of books lined every wall surface and the light streaming through the cracked shutters refracted their multicolored bindings into prisms of color onto the faded white walls. Three rolling ladders were attached to the shelves on all sides of the room, one to each wall. Mingling tones of toasty warm vanilla and acidic, leathery must lingered in the air and she smiled, inhaling with delight.

She pulled off her hat and shook out her hair.

"May I help you?"

Daisy whirled about. "Yes, I'm…." and the cheery words on her lips dried in her throat. "Oh. Hi."

"Hello." His voice was warm but his glacier-blue eyes were cool in a pale, angular face peeking out from under a mop of dark curls. He wore an apron tied around his tall, slender body, and a long towel was thrown over his shoulder. A long stirring spoon spotted with whipped cream was in his left hand. He smiled, then tilted his head in obvious curiosity and looked her up and down.

Daisy found her voice. "I'm Daisy. Yes, you can."

"Can what?"

"Help me."

He laughed. "It's what I'm here for."

"You look like you're here to serve coffee." She waved a finger at the towel and the spoon in his hand.

"I do a bit of that, too." He slid the coffee spoon into a well-hidden pocket in the apron. "I'm James."

"Hi, James. I'm Daisy."

"You said that."

"I did, didn't I?"

The two of them stood there looking at each other, smiling, then simultaneously began to laugh. As James's face lit up with his laughter and his crystal eyes sparkled at her, Daisy's gaze rested on the pale planes of his face and thought to herself that the idea of working at the Book On The Bright Side had just become a little more appealing.

Their laughter faded and she ducked her head so he wouldn't see her blush. There was a hint of an awkward pause that James filled with a drawling, "Soooo….." as he wiped his hands on the long towel. "I live to serve. Is it coffee you're after, or perhaps a story to while away your time at….wherever it is you go to school?"

She studied him, flattered by his probing tone and teasing smile. He cocked one brow and a wayward curl dropped over it, looking so soft and springy she had to fight the urge to reach over and push it back. "Queen Katherine's," she finally said with a small, flirtatious smile of her own. "And no, I'm not here for a book. Or coffee. I'm here to ask about the vacancy."

James grinned. "Then you'll want to chat with Mae." He motioned for her to follow him with a flick of his head and strode off down the cramped hallway to the back of the bookstore towards the rear coffee bar. When she hurried to match his quick strides he slowed and let her catch up, then leaned in conspiratorially and whispered, "I'll put in a good word for you."


End file.
